We have a few new readers. Welcome! There are also a few updates to share, so I am making this month’s essay available for all to read. Thank you for being here.
It is peak autumn, and the soil beneath my feet is cool and dry. My body wants to breathe the crisp air into my lungs, and give some of myself back out to that same air. I am ready to hunker down, to return.
I finished reading Between the World and Me, by Ta-Nehisi Coates, in just a few days. By all accounts, this is a fast pace for me. This epistolary memoir is relatively short, at 152 pages, and because it is written as a letter, I felt a bit more freedom as a reader than I usually do with some academic texts. There are many passages that I want to remember, so I wrote those down: phrases that sparked my curiosity, ideas that made me want to study more, and quotes that were spot-on in their formation. As I review my notes—and rewrite them for greater legibility and coherence—the theme of nature emerges as a central presence. This theme takes on different shapes, including time and space, physical and spiritual essences, the land, and repeatedly, the Black body.
Written as a letter to his then-teenage son, Coates illuminates the experience of being Black in America, alongside the realities of raging anti-Black violence, and the plundering of imagination. Similar to Jesmyn Ward’s essay, “My True South: Why I Decided to Return Home,” Coates frames racism as an embodied experience. While Ward grew up in Mississippi, Coates came up in Baltimore, and both weave between descriptions of struggle and survival. They address the nature of the violence inflicted upon Black and Brown bodies as a mirror of the violence inflicted upon the Earth. The extraction of the spirit of Black and Brown people is the extraction of the essence of the land: blood, fossil fuels, flesh, rocks, bone, and minerals. In Ward’s essay, and Coates’ epistolary, the construction of race in America is a scaffolding of illusion, one that perpetually builds monuments to worship itself. It spreads this doctrine far and wide, through a process of degradation of the body, mind, and spirit.
The role of the body and breath as sites of injustice is central in my work. I try to glean how we talk and think about the body, and how the body is treated in the context of cultural, medical, and ecological realities. Toni Morrison’s “The Site of Memory,” always serves as a guide in my inquiry. The reality of being born Black or Brown in this country is that you not only have to reclaim your imagination, but you also have to do the work of re-imagining. Morrison speaks to this in the essay, referring to her work as a writer and editor as a type of archeology, whereby remains are exposed, sorted, and stitched together. These sites are intimately connected to memories stored within the land; in order to cast new visions, we need to know who and what came before.
My first experience with disembodiment was early on. In the womb, I inhaled plumes of smoke through the chimney of my mother’s body. It was the 80s, and back then, it was still considered safe to smoke during pregnancy, or anywhere else one pleased. The house that I grew up in felt like a long tunnel between clarity and fog: fresh air was on the other side. There were moments of reprieve, at other people’s houses, at school, at church, and outside. I didn’t realize how cloudy things were until I tested the capacity of my own lungs. Lighting up a half-smoked cigarette from the stained-glass ashtray, my heart pounding, I took a drag. My lips caught the menthol flavor first, and then my throat began to crack away like little chips of ice crashing to the ground. When the smoke entered my lungs, an alarm went off in my brain. It would not quiet until inhaled more smoke, and then again.
I never claimed to be a smoker. I would weave in and out of the habit for years until one day I rejected it altogether. Eventually, my mother stopped smoking in the house, doing her best to stop outright. Now, when I accompany her on doctor’s visits, and they ask when was her last cigarette, she looks to me for the answer. The smoke between us may have appropriated my body, but my love for my mother, and her body, means that I do not look away.
There are many more fibers connecting me to my mother. Smoke is one of them. While our flesh and spirits will always be entwined, there is also a great divide. The world told my mother that in order to be acceptable, she must become disoriented from herself. She would pass this rhetoric on to me, not through words, but in her actions. The reason my mother started smoking is the same reason that I moved through the world as a disembodied young woman of color. We are cut from the same cloth, our struggle and survival is bond.
In pairing the readings for this month, I witnessed another theme emerge that I will call “critique in context.” While reading adjacent work about each of the authors, I came across a few critiques, particularly concerning the work of Coates. I would be remiss not to mention this because, if anything, Between the World and Me reinforces the importance of maintaining a critical analysis as a means of building consciousness. Equally important is that some of the critiques come from public scholars that I admire, including Dr. Cornel West and bell hooks. In contrast to their ideas, I read an interview with Coates that was written by Ward in 2019, which highlights some of the nuances of his life as a writer and public figure.
Critiques and criticism have been elemental for Black and Brown people. Why wouldn't we rigorously question the policies and politics that position our survival as a threat? We are well-studied in systems of domination and their cosmic impact on our communities. As a writer, I want to be more diligent in reading critiques and criticism, an orbit of thought that I’d previously entered too infrequently. My body tells me it is essential, that it will help me to steward my consciousness and nurture my thinking, especially regarding the re-embodiment of Black and Brown people, and the rematriation of land.
The sites that remain, where we return to reorient ourselves, are teeming with storied ground. The body is one of those sites, a place where memory is stored and summoned. The body is a home, and because of the struggle and work and scholarship of our ancestors, we get to make it our own.
Updates
The results from last week’s poll are in! The 1.5 hour workshop time frame and acupressure techniques will remain. Many thanks to everyone who shared a response.
On that note, the Inner Ecology Winter Solstice Session is open for registration! We will gather on December 9th at 12:00 PM EST to explore the wisdom of the Winter season and learn how to align our inner rhythms with the cycles of nature through guided breathwork, acupressure, and reflective journaling.
Paid subscribers have access to all quarterly events. If you’d like to join us for the workshop, you can either upgrade your subscription or register online here. This is a sliding scale offer, open to any level of experience.
Here is kind love note that I received from a past workshop participant:
Thank you for the invitation and the warm welcome into your Breathwork Group today. I loved your information you shared with us at the beginning of the session as it created a nice groundwork for the practice following it. Will definitely return whenever I can. Thank you again.
Reading
In preparing for next month’s letters and essays, here is our November reading list:
“Indigenizing the Future: Why We Must Think Spatially in the Twenty-first Century”, by Daniel R. Wildcat; “Decoloniality and anti-oppressive practices for a more ethical ecology”, by Christopher Trisos, et. al; “Love in a Time of Terror: On Natural Landscapes, Metaphorical Living, and Warlpiri Identity”, by Barry Lopez.
Creating
Still sticking to the daily drawing, though towards the end of the month time has been more limited, so quick doodles have helped to maintain the practice.