Multicolored abstraction on a black background, studio light / Alamy Stock Photo
“At its best, science fiction stimulates imagination and creativity. It gets reader and writer off the beaten track, off the narrow, narrow footpath of what "everyone" is saying, doing thinking - whoever "everyone" happens to be this year.”
― Octavia E. Butler, Bloodchild and other Stories
To surrender to our imagination is a visceral experience. It requires us to melt into ourselves, relinquish control of our conscious mind, and examine unconscious blockages to experience nirvana—a sense of freedom and liberation. My most generative and creative periods occur during slower-paced, extended stretches when consciousness slips from the forefront and when I “push pause” to reflect and not press. It’s within these moments that the greatest inspiration, calm, and clarity emerges.
We are all creators and artists, and even if you doubt it, creativity and artistry lurk within, surround us, and are embedded in our DNA. For those who actively and intentionally pursue and tap into their artistry—I am now among its ranks—use and share their skills and abilities as gifts to communicate messages that can illuminate, unite, soothe, challenge, and appeal to who we are at the core—humanity stripped of constructed vestiges of otherness, superiority, and pretenses of being destined and chosen ones.
Occasionally, especially during calamitous events or incidents, we experience flashes of care, compassion, and a sense of belonging. In these situations, with no hesitation or pause to ask qualifying questions, the unexplainable occurs. Our shroud falls away, revealing a reawakened and activated core that reacts in the most natural human way. If only these flashes would hang around, linger, and not fly away like wounded homing birds returning to their familiar and yet disastrous existence—a severed and fractured state.
Our ultimate hope resides in tending to our imagination with the practice of……..
Creativity
“I want to remind us all that art is dangerous. I want to remind you of the history of artists who have been murdered, slaughtered, imprisoned, chopped up, refused entrance. The history of art, whether it's in music or written or what have you, has always been bloody, because dictators and people in office and people who want to control and deceive know exactly the people who will disturb their plans. And those people are artists. They're the ones that sing the truth. And that is something that society has got to protect. But when you enter that field, no matter whether that's Sonia's poetry or Ta-Nehisi's rather startlingly clear prose, it's a dangerous pursuit. Somebody's out to get you. You have to know it before you start, and do it under those circumstances, because it is one of the most important things that human beings do.”
⎯ Toni Morrison
Poetry, writing, reading, gardening, being surrounded by youthful energy, being in community—family or otherwise, pushing pause, and deep knowing and abiding faith are all levers that tend to my imagination. At varying times, I have leaned on one or more of them to get through periods and occasions where my very being feels stretched, frayed, and rattled. Maybe you have felt this constriction, too.
The last several years, up to the present, and with every indication of stretching into the future, have been a prolonged period where my core—body, mind, and spirit—has been rendered shaken, disturbed, and uneased. I am in survival mode, hoping to get through this as best I can; it has been an extended season of tending to the imagination. Recently, with increased intensity, I have drawn on, written about, and spoken about all the things and practices I have summoned, implored, and adopted to ease overwhelm.
I started writing poetry before I entered my teen years—not with any particular purpose in mind beyond it being a way to corral and express feelings, thoughts, and ideas. Although I have written poetry for a long time, Collecting Courage was the first time I shared my poetry publicly. For me, it’s a form of creative expression where words float and visions emanate, brushing up on possibilities and opportunities. Several years ago, I wrote a poem in Jamaican Patois titled "Dem Dere Words." In the poem, I expressed how the power of words and narratives can be utilized for both positive and negative purposes, capable of uplifting or causing harm. Creativity, in all its forms, can connect us in ways that touch the essence of our humanity.
Care
“Truth be told, ‘The System’ impotent can do no harm or deliver blows
without its enablers, defenders and those in comfort of complacency’s arms.
‘Cause as surely as it hurts ‘Others’ it’s bamboozled self-anointed ‘Belongers’
planting seeds of hatred sprouting white superiority
instead of seeds of equity and our shared humanity. Oppression and
exploitation doesn’t have to be our final destination.”
⎯ Nicole Salmon, Collecting Courage Joy, Pain, Freedom, Love
The quoted stanza above is an excerpt from the poem Come, Take a Walk With Me, my contribution to the anthology Collecting Courage: Joy, Pain, Freedom, Love. It juxtaposes a brutal and dehumanizing past and doubling-down present while expressing a lamentation for another way to co-exist as one humanity.
The practice of care doesn’t always look or feel like softness. Sometimes, it comes as hard-hitting truth like these lyrics in Big Bill Broonzy’s song Black, Brown and White, released in 1951:
This little song that I'm singin' about
People you know it's true
If you're black and gotta work for a living
This is what they will say to you
They says if you was white, should be all right
If you was brown, stick around
But as you's black, m-mm brother, git back git back git back
Oftentimes, care leaves us feeling uncomfortable, like shards of glass ripping and slicing through our flesh, leaving us exposed and vulnerable—raw, aggrieved, and angered. It looks like undeniable truths we try our darndest to deny, ignore, or a place from which to launch rapid and sustained counter-attacks of lies. If you discover that you have been harmed and lied to all your life, would you feel cared for? The absolute plain truth is this: regardless of our identities, we are all immersed and baptized in an ocean of lies designed to fracture, separate, and distract from the truth, the impact of which is more harmful and deadly for many who walk through life in bodies deliberately and skillfully marginalized.
Challenge
“I want to tell you I was wrong. I want to tell you that your oppression will not save you, that being a victim will not enlighten you, that it can just as easily deceive you.”
⎯Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Message
Through choices and decisions made, we continue to build, at an alarmingly ravenous rate, extractive societies that fail to accept, respect, and maintain the delicate balance that is our ecosystem—the ultimate sustainer of all planetary life. The environmental, political, and socio-economic times offer clear signals that we are hurtling closer to disastrous outcomes for all animate and inanimate species. Our world is at an inflection point, and this visionary quote from Octavia E. Butler’s essay titled A Few Rules for Predicting the Future, originally published in Essence magazine in 2000, seems ominous for our times:
“When I was preparing to write Parable of the Talents, I needed to think about how a country might slide into fascism–something that America does in Talents. So I reread The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich and other books on Nazi Germany. I was less interested in the fighting of World War II than in the prewar story of how Germany changed as it suffered social and economic problems, as Hitler and others bludgeoned and seduced, as the Germans responded to the bludgeoning and the seduction and to their own history, and as Hitler used that history to manipulate them. I wanted to understand the lies that people have to tell themselves when they either quietly or joyfully watch their neighbors mined, spirited away, killed. Different versions of this horror have happened again and again in history. They’re still happening in places like Rwanda, Bosnia, Kosovo and East Timor, wherever one group of people permits its leaders to convince them that for their own protection, for the safety of their families and the security of their country, they must get their enemies, those alien others who until now were their neighbors.”
⎯ Octavia E. Butler
What can we do when the world around us is riddled with inhumanity?
Will averting our eyes offer ease as we sink deeper and deeper into depravity?
Can joy and freedom emerge from individual denial and collective inertia?
Will the peace we seek be attainable at the end of this chosen path?
Where is our individual and collective will and agency?
At a moment like this:
Who are we? Who are you?
Who must we be? Who must you be?
For several decades, I have been captivated and haunted by the words of the song War by the late Bob Marley. I later learned that a speech delivered by Haile Selassie in his 1963 address to the United Nations inspired the lyrics of the song.
“…..that until the philosophy which holds one race superior and another inferior is finally and permanently discredited and abandoned;
that until there are no longer first class and second class citizens of any nation;
that until the color of a man's skin is of no more significance than the color of his eyes;
that until the basic human rights are equally guaranteed to all without regard to race;
that until that day, the dream of lasting peace and world citizenship and the rule of international morality will remain but a fleeting illusion, to be pursued but never attained.
And until the ignoble and unhappy regimes that hold our brothers in Angola, in Mozambique and in South Africa in subhuman bondage have been toppled and destroyed;
until bigotry and prejudice and malicious and inhuman self-interest have been replaced by understanding and tolerance and good-will;
until all Africans stand and speak as free beings, equal in the eyes of all men, as they are in the eyes of Heaven;
until that day, the African continent will not know peace. We Africans will fight, if necessary, and we know that we shall win, as we are confident in the victory of good over evil.”
This message continues to manifest. Yes, much has happened in the sixty-two years since Selassie's speech, but the message applies today as it did then; our vision lacks the imagination required for transformative change—one that demands we unimagine the crumbling foundation of the current world to imagine and create possibilities that free us from the tortured and familiar realities we have known. I readily accept this because so often, my poetry is summoned from an uninhibited unconscious and brought to the conscious—I am the conduit for the message.
Compassion
In the same way, we must make room for truth to claim its place and wrestle with ourselves and others to live into dignity-filled ideals; we must cradle compassion. And doing so is a mighty struggle that feels unimaginable and impossible to offer within the baseness of unencumbered, nonreflective, and enduring violence. There is not much about the present moment that validates or signals compassion and hope are real possibilities. But what to make of this trembling ache from an unknown source beckoning that it can do “infinitely more than we can ask our imagine?” And through the despair, enraged heartbreak, and grief, I cling to the flickering promise of hope.
rakratchada torsap/ Alamy Stock Photo
I end with a poignant message of compassion and hope, the kind beautifully expressed by Yahia Lababidi in the opening poem of his book of poetry titled Palestine Wail, published by Daraja Press. Since purchasing the book, I have read the poem every day—it tends to feed my imagination. I hope it does the same for you.
Hope
Hope’s not quite as it seems,
Its’s slimmer than you’d think
And less steady on its feet.
Sometimes, it’s out of breath
can hardly see ahead
and cries itself to sleep.
It may not tell you all this
or the times it cheated death
But, if you knew it, you’d know
how Hope can keep a secret.
