literature as a salve

an orange-tinted photograph of me wearing a block-printed scarf that covers my hair. my hand holds the scarf across my face, my mother's gold bangle low on my forearm. photograph by Venkatesh Ellaboina, at a portraiture workshop hosted by NYC Photo Stroll.

After the strike on Rafah last weekend, I couldn’t bring myself to go back to the emails and meetings like usual. I couldn’t, and I didn’t think I should. There were children without heads and parents screaming and endless fire. I had to stop.

There was an American official — a brown woman consumed by her proximity to whiteness — signing missiles with glee. We have to stop.

I fled to a local bookstore, finding some kind of foundational grounding in a stack of books, many beloveds — Ocean Vuong, Octavia Butler, Carmen Maria Machado, Fariha Roisin, Audre Lorde, Akweke Emezi, Alice Wong. I picked up a book from 1977 called The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions, and I found myself clutching it like a talisman.

It is Pride, after all, and we are amidst revolutions.

I needed the reminder that we the people have done this before. I may not know how to hold this yet, and I certainly cannot hold it alone — but the people do — we do, collectively.

Since last week, I’ve been devouring Parable of the Sower, pencil in hand for the text, library audiobook in my ears. I first read Octavia Butler at the end of 2020, deployed to the pandemic response, similarly searching for answers in my growing radicalization within Black feminist literature — radical as in root, radicalized as in rooted.

This time I want to feel surrounded by the words, cocooned by the book in every possible way. I feel the need to absorb these books into my skin — a balm for the burning and the screaming that have embedded themselves in my memory.

A balm not to comfort for just for comfort’s sake, but to be able to pick up again, to turn towards, again. Grief reveals and reshapes our politic, and art becomes both a solace for and an expression of that politic.

We hold death, and we do not turn away.