(image by Pedro Molina)
Should we thank the present President of the United States of America for making American horror more visible? Its conscious actions and discourse? This season breathes new life into itself. Perhaps a triumphant transformation is afoot.
Got plans? Mind if I stay for a while? The rainbow is long overdue. Irritation can be inexplicably moving. You grab a canvas just before opening an airmail envelope. It isn’t hard to think in pink. There is nothing especially novel about walking between civilization and barbarism; between two windows.
It doesn’t really work when I’m being second-guessed. My back’s against the wall, but I’m not waiting until I’m dead to be immortal.
Barreling through bare-ass good time. Bari-sax philosophy, moist astrology, red carpet Americana. Not too tight a grip on symmetry or circumference.
And if you can’t take a joke, get the hell out of my country! Understanding blackness and its truth. More easily hummed than otherized. Silhouettes as narratives. I think there’s always been an intimate connection between us.
As if the wind made some filthy remark. Not easily summed up. I’ve come to say I’m splitting. The whole earth shindig. Karmic sitting surfside. A bottle of pills within reach. Camera karma.
As well as the plumage of a flowerpot. Presumably a passing storm. The world is my song. Thumbed music sheet torn. A house in ruins mid-hill. A nation born in the desert. Obviously a rundown and abandoned house.
To recollect is to rescue memory, feeling, thought, warning. Nigeria shifted from a land of peace and promise to that of state-sponsored starvation, firing squads, hangings, military coups/military juntas, violence against protesting students and youth, arrest and imprisonment of journalists, bad poetry, kidnapping of school girls by Islamic fundamentalists, armed robbery, official corruption, bloody tyranny/dictatorship. How could I ever forget? As I write, right now, Nigeria has a fake and brutal democracy. There are more than three strands to this wound.
There’s a point at which the speech of the city ends. So many things to undo. Persona and infamy. They have it on vinyl. Civilization and antiquity. Split the LP in two. Thought harder, loved harder. A long day’s journey into hope.
Obsession-ethical, artistic, visionary- may be one of the ways of dismantling fascism/tyranny piece by piece. No nation should be left alone to suffer the ignoble destiny of languishing under any kind of dictatorship-governmental, cultural, economic, spiritual. The struggle against tyranny is a generative project. Battling oppression internationally is at the core of my practice as a writer and activist. I am part of a global network of artistic freedom fighters.
Are some people pre-programmed for existential bullshit/disaster? Where does the wish to accumulate too much wealth and dominate others come from? The sickening and compulsive inclinations of the present world order? Is there a death drive in material culture? I’m always grappling with these questions. And I envision a much better world.
