our thinkers are dead, and their replacements are illiterate.

on the cost of nonchalance.

it is said that when you speak of the deceased, they call back to you from their realm. they don’t hear everything, only the words intended for them. the desperate cry of a lover deserted, or their mother. sometimes i wonder what they’re yelling down at us. platitudes to prove they are fine perhaps or curses, angered by the way we waste time they no longer have. james is probably instructing the angels to make sure billy porter doesn’t live long enough to complete his biopic of him (i think his misfortune was sealed the minute he kissed genocide joe’s hand in reverence); if hauntings are real, i predict baldwin capable enough to wage a successful one.

being raised a muslim is to be raised preoccupied with death. we are encouraged to talk about that final breath, and reckon with what we might have left to say even as children. we are to live as travellers, visitors. we know that the world will not stop moving after we leave. if it did, it would have halted the morning after we lost my grandmother. the sky would have caved in after we heard about whitney, or refaat alareer or chadwick boseman or assata shakur or hadrawi.

d’angelo is gone, and yet the earth still spins.

why is the question i’m preoccupied with this morning. i have strapped black messiah to me this past day like a newborn i’m anxious to put down; the lyrics to the charade will not stop following me around all the dreamers have gone to the side of the road which we will lay on/inundated by media/virtual mind fucks in streams…

it is easy to look at an elder, especially one like d’angelo who soundtracked our upbringing and mistake this reverence for nostalgia. it would be a dishonest dismissal. the brutal clarity of racism (thank you james for lending me such an astute phrase) lies in its effectiveness in trapping us in a cycle of self-contempt. it would have been so easy to believe them when they said any beauty i possessed was in spite of the color i shared with my mother and grandmother. every slur yelled at me by a drunk on a bus would have landed like papercuts on my spirit, but they did not. i had elders who sung love songs for girls like me, and writers who made me the centre even before i had the confidence to insist on it myself. who of this generation can i point to that would make my baby cousin feel the same way i did listening to really love?

grief is an illuminator. if you don’t know how you feel about someone, imagine their funeral- clarity will strike you lightening like. today, that light shines to illuminate a truth we’ve been avoiding for a while: with every great artist we eulogise, we grow closer to a new dark age. we are losing libraries of knowledge. the cemeteries are filling up with the last of our great thinkers. it seems there is no one left to replace them. who should we follow now? tiktokers who rely on ai-summaries to feed them ‘research’, or musicians who release eighty variants of the same masturbatory, self-exulting dross interested only in monopolising the desperation and low self-esteem of their misguided fans who think they can purchase their way into a relationship with said artist? who will teach us to love slowly, and indulgently? we buried our consciousness alongside you; those of us left behind are too scared to retrieve it.

we have a tendency to normalise the barbaric. take nonchalance. what violence exists in the nothingness we tout as cool; no, this does not move me. i owe you nothing. i am an island instead of a person and no, i do not care if you drown trying to reach me. here: look at this painting i slapped together in a haze of self-grandeur and removedness. isn’t it stylish? aren’t i stylish?

these people were not brilliant because they were born divined as special. we are a collection of choices, those made for us and those made by us. these people were brilliant because they cared. enough to learn, and to lock themselves away for years as d’angelo did until they found something valuable to say. they were eternal students, willing researchers and scribes. mountains of knowledge lay buried beneath the earth now. they worshipped their curiosity. they retreated when the photos started taking precedent over their work; the performance did not matter as much as the living did. the structures that keep us divorced from our own minds seem to have been built with concrete. we are in a drought of our own making.

we shy away from anything that would require sacrifice. we scoff down western individualism as if it is the antidote to western manufactured misery. you have a responsibility to learn about the wrongs being done because every isolated, lonely black girl is your responsibility. every bombed village is your hometown, baldwin said. how do you not feel responsible for your people? you cannot sever yourself from the world and then delude yourself into thinking you will produce work worth loving. your audience are also people, with dreams and fears and needs. they are not faceless wallets born to feed your ego. it is exploitative, your refusal to care. your sanity and comfort should be the cost you pay for wanting to be called an artist.

living through the perpetuation of multiple genocides has proven clarifying in other ways too. watching our writers cocoon themselves in a shroud of silence has been humbling. being palatable mattered more than honesty did; i hope the words they never spoke in condemnation turn to boulders in their stomachs. where has our audacity gone? we think leaving a hate comment for an actor we will never meet counts for rebelliousness. a thirst trap is where our capacity for sensuality begins and ends. we’re all selling ourselves but what of value are we actually producing?