Honey, why is you here?

Liberatory imagination or house of horrors?

I have been in a self-punishing battle with my own creativity. Because the stories driving me, driving to be told by me are also the most gruesome. And I find myself fearing that the goals I have are lost, of inspiring people to look towards themselves and others and grab change for themselves. Rebel. Fight. Act. Hurt with each other. Because, in these fictions I am making, where is the light in the house of horrors that I’m asking people to entertain themselves with? Doesn’t there have to be a light?

But as I write this, I remember what it felt like to start the EarthSeed trilogy by Octavia Butler in June of 2020. It did not fill me with hope, it TERRIFIED ME. And that terror began a more intense radicalization that had earlier begun with having an arms dealer for a consulting client that had earlier begun with Killing the Black Body. These moments remade me, and I do not regret that they were ugly and sorrowful.

An aside: And now it is 5 minutes maybe 10 after I started writing this article because of course I broke down in tears. I held my face in my wet hands because I went to check if Earthseed is one or two words, where i rerembered that the final book in the trilogy was Parable of the Trickster and finally, finally the second poetry book I’ve been working on, feels like continuity… i… i see it now. I see the shoulders I stand upon. I see, again, that, as Maya Angelou said, i have already been paid for.

Is it wrong of me to have a goal, a manipulative wish, to influence my viewer and reader? To expect a specific desirable feeling to leave them with? Because I’m selfish. I’m not interested in entertainment for the show of it. I want to push people off the cliff of complacency. I want you to fall into the water and fumble and then find us, each other, paddling through the currents together.

And here I am, full of self-judgement, before the story is even finished. I fear my own stories. I fear drowning you on accident. I fear causing hurt without healing.

Achieving my goals means i must do both. And I fear that what I am creating does not.

This is what my mind tells me. But my body tells me i only drown myself by fighting the surface. So, I hope that, by sharing this fear and this bodily wisdom, I can write one more page today to tell a story. I haven’t cast away this specter, but I hope that sharing it with you means I paddle a bit better today, then tomorrow.

And eventually I will find a way, as Ayana Zaire Cotton put it, to “make revolution irresistible.”

For now, the mess continues!