An Editor’s Note:
To Whom It May Concern:
I have embarked on this venture too many times to count, yet, I somehow, always and eventually, end up with ‘404, webpage not found.’ I think in a way I have been a little too self-absorbed. Actually, what I am, is completely self-referenced. I look to Audre Lorde, desperately suppressing the entropic threat of breast cancer, to affirm: “I am completely self-referenced because it is the only translation I can trust.” The paradox of being self-referential is in the semantic declaration: ‘this statement is a lie.’ In the fact of its declaration, the statement is actually true. My self-absorption becomes a paradoxical consequence of hyper self-awareness, obscuring the conundrum that I really live with 8 billion other people (not counting the guests that occupy our heads), in a house that is minutes away from imploding. So, yes, “I am completely self-referenced because it is the only translation I can trust,” particularly because any other translation would no longer be mine, and quite frankly, I require self-possession in a context where you are, by virtue of what you own or what you can do. [I can’t help but feel like I am echoing the quasi-philosophical, empty but still apt words of Tyler Durden: everything you own ends up owning you… blah blah blah]. The principle remains in spite of the conduit.
There is a reverberating silence that has nearly deafened me. Shame, fear, maybe even the occasional laziness (apathy) — what I have found in my muteness is a complicity to my disappearance; an unforgivable dissolution of an ‘I’ …a ‘me’ in the midst of other ‘I’s. In my attempt to order the disorderly chaos that characterises Euro American modernity (the now), I have tried to reveal a universal Truth, or universal Truths, but I have actually ended up alienating the I from myself (a me). There are no universal Truths. If I may, I guess in my desire to be considered articulate in the Academy, I find that I actually have nothing to be articulate about. Consequently, my self-reference is an attempt to tap the source, to reveal myself to myself, so that I may, however I can, position myself in this context that depersonalises so easily. Plainly: how do I personalise a State of depersonalisation?
My world is filled with broken pieces, or at least that’s what I am told. I don’t think they are broken, maybe a little bent, but definitely not broken. This work is holy work to me: I bare myself; I behold myself; I am who I and the World has never seen. Even though I burst apart, the fragments have been, and always will be, put back together again by another self...
An imposed state of stagnation finds itself in the inability to shift the sands of time, to ask for a new deck of cards, and that those cards be dealt differently. I come from a generation of individuals — people/persons, ideas (I am unsure if I can truly say they are individuals but that is for another day) — that simply accepted the cards they were dealt, somehow, someway, in self-righteousness, accepting their God makes no mistake. In replacement of human and personal agency, the discomfort, and maybe even paradox of ‘free will’ gives way to predestination as a means of swallowing the bile that rises in our throats when we face the complexities, the contradictions, and maybe even the shame that comes with the Audacity of Being. To be clear: I am unsure where I stand in this, I am unsure if it is so much the cards, or the game in which I am asked to play them, I don’t even think God has anything to do with it; what I do know for sure is this:
If the concept of God has any validity or any use, it can only be to make us larger, freer and more loving. If God cannot do this, then it is time we got rid of Him. — James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time
It is taking me a while to understand, and even perform the practicality of this. In all actuality, I am not sure if this is my main concern, really, I am a little too self-referenced to rely on God… (I am not sure if I can say this). For me, God, causality, and fear are all too interchangeable, synonymous, a kind of trinity. Yet, in a contradictory and impractical way, I have curated my moral centre of the world in this mix, relying on a cause and effect relationship that absolves me of affecting my own free will, and accepting the free will of others.
To my dear friend Terrell, I cannot affect the free will of others, and in this way, I have given up affecting my own.
I must exist in a perpetual process of Being and Becoming: a kind of poiesis, a distinct act of self-curation by a “thinking-speaking subject, whose thinking and speaking are not in opposition to feeling.” Kevin Quashie so eloquently positons this in Black Aliveness, Or A Poetics of Being (2021), and in my dialogue with this holy work, I find that, Being — the verb that precedes Becoming — as poiesis requires a kind of syncretism with the metaphorical and ideological “broken pieces” that have created an internal and external fracturing of our bodies and the materiality of our worlds. This alienation from self, this dissolution of an I in the midst of other I(s) require the revolutionary and poetic acts of gathering these pieces, and putting them in my pen.
I would like to go back to the beginning:
Tiger! Tiger!
Tiger! Tiger! Trapped behind bars
Surrounded by people, concrete and cars
See their faces everywhere.
Each person's own endless stare!
Day and night my dreams are the same
That one day there will come an end to this pain
Whipping and beating me with a cane
Makes me remember when they came!
Esther Adeyemo (11)
Riverview Junior School, Once Upon a Rhyme (Kent) [2012].
Sometimes I forget how I got here, but, in some twisted way, it has always been through an indescribable and unequivocal need for affection, and a terrible need to give it. (But really, what was she going through at 11 please… lol). Regardless, this unequivocal need found home in words, letters, the silences in the spaces metaphors and oxymorons conjure. In a way, or more ways than I have ever allowed myself to consider, I have been writing in my silences, through silences, in silences. Words: they bend, they break, they shape, and I have irreverently relied on them as the telos of my reality. I run into trouble when I forget simply, that the desire, the need is, and always has been quite average and plain:
I wish to be a decent person and a great writer.
Thank you, James, for teaching me, that it can be just that simple. — e.
