#tallie2022stories

[theteej]

Saying Goodbye

I didn’t plan to leave things.  But I did.

I think of the now so oft-repeated phrase from Nina Simone, well worn and frayed to the point of being nearly threadbare: “You have got to get up from the table when love is no longer being served.”

And so I did.  Three times.

It’s a bit of a weird headspace to be in, the realization that for me walking away from things required a sense of security or stability to do so.  I left two professional organizations and a spiritual home, all because they couldn’t and wouldn’t reckon with their own anti-blackness, and because I was now in a secure and stable enough position to do so.  I had tenure and a sense of general security in my career that I could tell the American Historical Association and the African Studies Associations that they were contemptible, or more accurately, no longer a place that I would no longer shrink parts of myself down to attend.  Then I left my own church, a place I had struggled to make home, that I had poured parts of myself in and generally receiving white entitlement and constant disappointment.  So I left places, institutions really, that I wanted to love me, or to at least see me.  Perhaps it’s foolish to expect that from entities.  But I tried anyway.

As I look back on it, I keep thinking about the heartbreaking ballad “I Can’t Make You Love Me,” first made popular by Bonnie Raitt. Indeed, I’ve joked before that when I’m in a particularly bad place I like to listen to the Raitt version just to hurt my own feelings.  Sure, it has a weird valence into eighteen months of singledom and a year of trying to seek romantic companionship, but really there’s a more powerful riff to be felt right now in the slow unfolding of heartbreak when a space that was supposed to be a harbor or a space for you, isn’t anything like it at all. The Bonnie Raitt version is the definitive classic, but lately I’ve found myself gravitating to the cover by Black queer musician Joy Oladokun, who brings a different melancholy to it, an ache of feeling abandoned more broadly than by a lover.  Her version has played repeatedly in my brain this year when I think of my three departures.  

Turn down the lights Turn down the bed Turn down these voices inside my head Lay down with me Tell me no lies Just hold me close, don't patronize Don't patronize me

I first started attending the African Studies Association as a graduate student, and found it to be a largely generative space—I mean, if you teach anything about the African continent, you are well used to being one of the only people in your university who does. If you’re lucky, there’s a historian, maybe a social scientist, or if you’re lucky a literature scholar or musician.  Maybe. The ASA exists in a way to help you see people who think about the same things you do, who rehearse the same stakes, who hold the same things in tension, and like most associations it provides an annual chance to check in.  For a few years I co-led the subfield of Queer African Studies, and I tired desperately to feel like I was making headway in a space like that.

But there’s always, always been a problem with ASA.  From its inception as an area studies discipline at the height of the Cold War, it has been a reserve for white North American scholars to ‘discover’ truths about Africa, to mine its intellectual and cultural offerings for larger understandings about the human condition, to provide flavour to the North, and to provide a sense of meaning or distinction for the (usually) well-intentioned white folks who bring this hidden knowledge.  It is often caricatured as a place where there are unfortunate caftan/boubou/dashiki choices on melanin-free bodies, but it goes beyond that.  With the exception of a few amazing Black mentors, the vast majority of the people I encountered, learned from, or deciphered the academy with, were white. Painfully so.  As someone who came into African studies as an African-American and staunch anti colonialist who wanted to return to and recenter the dignity of Black voices and bodies, influenced by my hero Keletso Atkins, I was always going to run into trouble.  At previous years I’d encountered racist aggression from book editors, panel organizers, or South African historian colleagues.  But that felt like the price of doing business, especially as a junior scholar who needed to be established and to make this all work.  But I got tenure in 2021, and two things happened.

First, right before then, at the height of Black reckonings in 2020, the then-editor of The African Studies Review, Benjamin Lawrance, made a particularly crude and thoughtless joke about slavery to me, and did not quickly grasp how joking about a history I’d inherited and my ancestors experienced, was not appropriate in the least. Lawrance felt himself still entitled to be the major gatekeeper of the Association’s academic journal, and I realized more and more that ASA was a space for white colleagues to feel comfortable, in Black language, lands, culture.  It always had been.  My white Africanist colleagues tutted, shook their heads, and largely did nothing. They felt bad, but they also knew what I knew—they were taking up space from Black thinkers and writers, they were mining Black stories for their own careers.  They were very often petty versions of Rhodes and Lugard and Faidherbe, and even when they were nice and well-intentioned, they were still occupying. They were setting the terms for what was acceptable or recognizable for the field, and demanded Black people in the diaspora and from the continent comply, and generally felt comfortable with them solely as informants, even if they treated them nicely and cited them.

This all came to a head in May of 2022, when the ASR published an article on auto-ethnography written by two white women, Kathryn Mara and Katrina Daly Thompson.  While the article was largely a literature review on auto-ethnography, there were particularly troubling moments where both women demonstrated a profound sense of largesse and entitlement.  Mara talked about her comfort regained by talking about being a white foreigner in sessions at the ASA, Thompson demonstrated an astonishing lack of self-reflection when writing about the perils of ‘going native’ in Swahili marital practices that came dangerously close to culture-vulturing. In short, these white women wrote a piece that was clumsy and self-centering and for Black scholars, revealed what we’d known all along: Africa was not for us.  It was for white knowledge and centering.  And Thompson’s supercilious and victimizing response to criticism only underlined this.

A group of incredibly brave African junior scholars wrote an open letter underlining their anguish, their continued frustration, and the fury at being spoken of, yet again, in the abstract in the premiere journal of our field.  And of course, the editorial board, largely white, chose to admonish them and call them unruly and undisciplined.  Then after a resultant furor, invited them, condescendingly to submit to ASR, a turn of phrase notable in its demands for power and recognition, and one that continued to gatekeep.  Thompson remained defiant and unapologetic. Lawrance doubled-down and asserted he should stay at the head of the journal.  He just received a Fulbright to teach about Africa on the continent.  And the junior scholars? They were largely attacked online, insulted, and threatened. The white women were never in danger, but felt aggrieved and used their power to remind us all that the African Studies Association is a white playground for white people to feel comfortable and entitled to our knowledge and selves.  As I sat in the last few weeks of running an inaugural Africana Studies minor at a predominantly white institution, I cried.  I felt warm hot tears spill from my eyes on an afternoon walk, the hot June wind whipping at my face.  I thought about how I tried to make space in a discipline that wasn’t for me, in a field that always imagined me as a curiosity at best, and a distraction from ‘real work’ more often.  I thought of the frequent insults from senior white colleagues at a Southern African historical writing workshop over the years held…in Vermont, of course.  I thought of my very kind, very nice colleagues my age in my field at other universities.  I thought about how these white American scholars taught African history, anthropology, sociology, theatre, politics.   And yet, the pain of slavery wasn’t theirs.  They didn’t feel the cut in their heart when teaching their largely white student bodies about African lives and didn’t feel the same painful necessity of advocating for the very humanity of your people who are always consigned to the background, erased, seen as obstacles.  They could, in fact, do this job with more ease than me, because at the end of the day it was an abstract thought experiment about disciplinary interest, and not a project of humanity or recovery.  It was a colonial structure that allowed them comfort in Black lives and stories, and the whole game was rigged against us, always.

I sagged onto a bus bench and sobbed, breath ragged.  How could I make something love me that was ultimately designed to make me an implement? How could I charm or cajole or threaten or convince that I was human and that I and other Black people deserved the center space of the story?  I grimaced to realize that I’d been trying for a decade.  And so I simply walked away.  I walked away from my planned panel, I walked away from an organization I tried to work within and feel love from.  And I let the white people in their dashikis continue to play their games. “Your absence was felt this year,” white colleagues told me when the conference came and went in November.  And yet that wasn’t enough for me.  I can’t build something that won’t acknowledge its bloody brokenness.

‘Cause I can't make you love me if you don't You can't make your heart feel something it won't Here in the dark, in these final hours I will lay down my heart and I'll feel the power But you won't, no you won't ‘Cause I can't make you love me, if you don't

When I returned from Aotearoa/New Zealand in August right before the new school year, I thought all I had to think about was last minute class planning.  Until the president of the American Historical Association, the main professional organization for historians in the United States, decided to publish an opinion piece in our main publication, Perspectives.

In the September 2022 issue, James H. Sweet argued that History was in danger of becoming too presentist, devoid of argumentation of meaning and being suited for small political agendas aside from the larger work of analysis.  This was not a particularly novel argument (it’d been made more thoughtfully twenty years earlier by Lynn Hunt), but it attempted to link this to Republican anti-historical arguments against ‘critical race theory’ or negative US history….and to African-American historicizing of enslavement with the 1619 project.

This is where Sweet’s argument got particularly shocking.  Sweet began by saying that he, a white historian of Africa, had been to Ghana that summer and had observed an African-American family holding a copy of the 1619 Project while also touring Ghanaian slave castles.  Ghanaian tour guides spoke of the slave diaspora to Black American onlookers and they interpreted this information—incorrectly to Sweet’s eyes.

Without speaking to any of the Black people themselves, Sweet opined:

“As I reflected on breakfast earlier that morning, I could only imagine the affirmation and bonding experienced by the large African American family—through the memorialization of ancestors lost to slavery at Elmina Castle, but also through the story of African American resilience, redemption, and the demand for reparations in The 1619 Project. Yet as a historian of Africa and the African diaspora, I am troubled by the historical erasures and narrow politics that these narratives convey.”  

This is the heart of what is fucked up about Sweet.  Sweet argued for a history that wasn’t distorted for immediate ends.  But he also assumed his own authority to speak over what would be a singular and important experience explicitly for African-Americans reckoning with their own historic disaffection and disconnection within a history of enslavement and destruction.  Sweet did not even stop to think about how he spoke over and for Black people.  He did not stop to speak to them.  They were abstract ideas marshalled for an argumentative point that he felt he had the objective authority to explain.  Sweet declared that as a white American historian of Africa he knew more and more importantly he knew exactly what Black American visitors to Elmina castle in Ghana would be thinking and doing.  Let me be clear what this felt like as a Black person.  We were not fully autonomous people to James Sweet. We were abstract ideas to be moved about. We did not have interior thoughts or ideas—we were instead easily knowable.  He didn’t speak to Black people, but he could and did “imagine the affirmation and bonding experienced” by people who had endured histories of dehumanizing structural enslavement.  The arrogance is breathtaking. The arrogance was why I left the ASA.  The reason came back again.

I and others wrote back, furiously, against this piece. The AHA reached out to me specifically and asked me to write a rebuttal.  I was furious.  I couldn’t believe that I’d been asked to give my time and labor to respond and submit to a journal that had just denied my full humanity and once again used my labor to legitimate itself.  I was aghast. And tenured. And didn’t have to stay.  I’m a historian.  My discipline is important to me as a specific scholar.  But the organization had never felt like home.  I’d shivered in an ill-fitting suit a decade ago hoping for a job, pretended to belong amid countless panels, none of which cared much for Africa. I’d written for them twice, but still never felt like what I did mattered in the sea of white entitlement.  And Sweet’s election was supposed to mean some form of inclusion for Africa!  After all of this, conservative columnist David Frum reached out multiple times, trying to needle me for responses to why I would be so mean to a good-hearted scholar like Sweet.  After the ASA, I didn’t cry.  Instead, I felt something seize up in me, oxidize, harden.  The living tissues within me became stiff, unyielding. My heart encased itself in ice.  I did not give a fuck if Sweet apologized or the AHA became better, because the organization could not see me.  Could not see me as a person.  And so I left.

I'll close my eyes, then I won't see The love you don't feel when you're holding me

And of course, between both of these exits, I left my church.

I first attended First Lutheran Church in San Diego when I was looking for an apartment in San Diego in June 2018.  I’d joined a Lutheran Church formally in 2015 while living in rural Virginia, and had been heartened as a congregation examined its long-held ideas and struggles, and became a formally-affirming church for LGBTQ+ people.  They fought white supremacy.  They…made pancakes and did weird German shit.  I loved them.  And so I joined First Lutheran, which had an active homeless food ministry, social justice credentials, and was also a queer-affirming congregation.  I had a friend who already went, and it was a great place to go.  The interim pastor, a man named Darryl, was a thoughtful and powerful preacher of social justice and openly queer.  He challenged the largely older and affluent white congregation to see beyond themselves, and I left inspired.  Unfortunately, Darryl left in 2019 to join a permanent posting, and our church eventually chosen a perfectly pleasant but none-too challenging or critical clergyman named Kurt.  He was a genial white man who looked like every white person’s Midwestern uncle who loved football and being nice.  Multiple times I had to talk to Kurt after services and say talking about “Navajo white paint” without any critical thought about that color might mean, or saying “I’m glad that formal racism against Black people ended with Martin Luther King” was WILDLY inappropriate.  Kurt always nodded gravely and asked for help, and sat with me giving him instruction, but was never around when I specifically asked for counsel, or said I was struggling and needed support.  But I was needed to read scripture every few weeks, or to lead Juneteenth celebrations, or to talk about Black church history, all of which I did for free without exception.

The end came in June of 2022. During finals week in late May, I’d been asked to give a talk about Juneteenth for the church’s event, organized by Kurt’s wife.  I agreed, although to be honest I was tired and frustrated that I was always asked to talk about this.  Don’t get me wrong, I’m a heritage descendant of Juneteenth celebrants, and my grandfather’s great-grandparents were freed on June 19th, 1865 in Texas.  It’s important to me.  But when I didn’t respond with a talk title the day I was asked, the pastor’s wife informed me via email that I was going to be dropped from the program and they’d find someone to talk about some other event and make it more broadly about June events.

I was livid.  First Lutheran is 95% white, and its leadership entirely so.  And yet they’d decided that they knew what Juneteenth was and wasn’t, and disinvited me, a professional historian and a direct heritage celebrant of the holiday, from presenting.

That was the last straw. I couldn’t keep going somewhere that didn’t want me, that didn’t have me. That couldn’t have me.  And to be honest, no one cared much I left.  If they felt sad that one of two Black congregants left, I heard little tell of it.  My white friends who I had brunch with after church and discussed issues, all looked uneasy at the idea of themselves leaving, which would mess with their comfort or their potential idea of ‘challenging’ a church uninterested in Black input.  And there were no other Lutheran churches in the area that were queer-affirming.  It has been a profoundly shattering experience to find that a space that should’ve been for you wasn’t.

While I’ve felt a level of peace about leaving all three places, it still fucking sucks.  It’s worse than not being wanted—these people want you if you are sanded down enough to fit a space that they deem appropriate. It’s being deemed acceptable if and only if you can endure the denial of your importance or value.  When the amazing African junior scholars said enough in May, I realized I had to do the same.  I couldn’t just keep taking it.  But there’s something profoundly saddening about learning that a place that could love you, that really could….it won’t.  And I’ve years of therapy and parental abandonment issues to know exactly why it hurts like a sharp pain between my ribs, this feeling of the love never reaching you, the sense that you will never be cared for.

And I’m so grateful I’m grown enough to leave.  But I wish I’d been loved instead.

Morning will come and I'll do what's right Just give me till then to give up this fight And I will give up this fight

[theteej]

This Damn Body

I would be remiss if I spent time talking about 2022 and didn’t talk about my body.  Oof.  There’s so much to discuss about my body and my feelings about it—what I wore over it, how I felt about the way it took up space, how I navigated anxieties over safety by putting various vaccines in it, among other things—so let’s just dive in and think about the many different ways I think about this strange and compelling lump of light brown flesh and my many different feelings.

Fleshy Weight and Himbodom

The beginning of 2022 found me in a confusing and curious headspace.  I’d rejoined a gym at the end of May 2021, and began the process of working to change my body composition after fourteen months without structured gym exercise.  I’d lost muscle mass, I’d put on about forty pounds (18 kg), and was just in a prediabetic sugar range—something told with unsettling glee by a visiting doctor who’d taken my vitals in August 2021.  But regular gym time, constant exercise and a renewed schedule and eating had made some more noticeable changes.  By the beginning of the year I’d lost all of the pandemic weight and dropped out of the prediabetic range (I flinched visibly as the doctor praised me at ‘overcoming my body’—what a weird, fucked up and evangelical phrase).  As omicron dawned with its full fury and rage, I took a pause on the gym for six weeks, but kept up a regular fitness plan at home five days a week and supplemented it with my many, many long walks.  In hindsight, it makes sense as to why the walks became almost obsessive with me, reaching at one point 50 miles (80 kilometers) walked in a week, which was honestly too many.

If you’ve never been fat, I need to break this moment down for you.  Most of us, who grew up fat, who were seen as fat—especially in the 1990s which was a vicious and openly fatphobic time in media and broader culture—were trained to hate our bodies, to see them as short-term embarrassments, temporary setbacks on the road to being loved.  And most of us, through excruciating will power and terrible choices, lost the weight! We dropped down and only drank skim milk, eschewed pork for turkey, ate as many snackwell cakes that tasted like desperation and self-loathing with a thin chocolate coating as we could.  And inevitably, six or twelve or fifteen months later, the weight returned, and the sense of shame.  The sense of the treadmill of acceptability.  I’ve written much more at length about this phenomenon, which I tie to evangelical homophobia as well—the idea of being loved on credit, that you were only acceptable so long as you were changing who you were—so I won’t go into it here.  But I do want to talk about how this idea stayed with me, burned into my mind and heart, and therefore plagued me a bit in 2022 as I feared my ‘gains’ of the previous year would reverse, betraying me just like the failure Charlie Gordon experienced as his intellect wilted away in Flowers for Algernon (good God that book stays with me).  Sometimes I had to stop and think—what am I doing this for, this thing about my body?

Mercifully, my dear friend Robert, who spent 2022 gaining his official certification as a personal trainer and nutritionist, was not willing to let me endure in this space.  He reminded me that I loved being strong more than I loved being desirable, and he pushed me to think about what I actually wanted other than “not hatefully fat.”  His kindness was a balm for some of the more entrenched and shitty aspects of my fatphobia, and reminded me of my own goals.  And this moment helped me to think about my own physical and sexual feelings, too.  I had to think about my body in reference to a silly concept I’d discussed over previous years: Doctor Himbo.

For the uninitiated, a ‘himbo’ is a portmanteau of ‘he’ and ‘bimbo,’ the idea of a good-natured and attractive beefcake who offers not much by way of intellectual challenge.  He’s a stock character in queer and women-centered media, and the idea of being a hot, dumb but pleasant person also has its references in other media (for example, Kronk from the Emperor’s New Groove is a quintessential himbo.  Kristof in Frozen is definitely debatable as well).  The idea of the himbo is an attractive one—he’s a desirable but also intellectually daft character, a kind but deeply physical person.  He is, in many ways, the antithesis of me. 

I am anxious and deeply intellectual, I feel my body moves through so much irony and meta-description, that I can’t just be unencumbered.  I remember the times my (ironically very himbo-adjacent) father, a former high school and college football star, would yell at me to do laps in an empty parking lot and tell me he was embarrassed at my lack of athletic prowess, even when my asthma caused me to retch between cars in a Ralph’s parking lot, my tears and vomit leaking into oily puddles that reflected the disdain etched in his face.  But I’d also inherited his genes as well, and I put on muscle easily, readily; ever since I first cleared 300lbs (140kg) on the weight bench at fifteen, I’d known I could be strong. 

So this year, once I returned to the gym with omicron’s decrease in mid-February, I pushed towards strength with a vengeance.  Being strong didn’t mean emulating my father, but it did mean a particular competence in my body that wasn’t about loathing what it wasn’t.  I’d never be thin. But my God, I could be strong. My body was ready and waiting to thicken in muscle; back broadened again, my arms swelled, my chest ballooned.  I was most impressed by my thighs, which hadn’t ever been this big before, and I found myself increasingly racking up weight after weight. (As of the beginning of 2023, I’ve cleared 600lbs/275kg in leg presses, which is fucking WILD)  I felt my body changing, to match some of my more ridiculous ideas.

And there’s the tension.  I’m afraid and overly-intellectual.  But a himbo is not; the character is instead a cartoon concept of beefy masculinity, unencumbered by the difficulties of absurdity, contradictions, or daily thought.  In some ways, the himbo was an ideal character for me to put on, to feel confidence, and to push back my childhood anxiety and horror and trauma.  And so that’s where Dr. Himbo, the brilliant professor who is also a powerful and generally good-hearted beefcake, began to take shape in my mind.  These contradictions excite and fuel me.  They make me feel powerful and quite frankly, incredibly sexy.  They also are terrifying and weird and I’m well aware that they’re playing with concepts and archetypes.  I’m basically the queer Black Bruce Banner your boyfriend warned you about—because he’s the Hulk at the same time—and he loves postcolonialism and speedos.

But 2022 ended with me flexing angrily in front of a mirror, throwing another weight after another into the air with controlled jerks, sweat dripping past my eyes.  Dr. Himbo is here, he’s queer, and he’s going to laugh and flex past so many fault lines.

New Year, New Fabric

I found myself in 2022 also looking for new ways to cover my body.  After eighteen months of pandemic inspired caftans, I needed a switch, something different.  Two new things found themselves covering this frame—crowns and jumpsuits.

I’d gotten my first felt crown hat from my mother as a gift for getting tenure in 2021.  I found the way it emulated the sardonic and jaunty Jughead of Archie comic fame a draw, but I couldn’t anticipate just how much other people would like them.  People fucking love these hats, y’all.  They’ll stop me in bars, grocery stores, church parking lots, the dentist’s office.  They never seem to want them for themselves; they just like the idea that it’s something so familiar yet different perched on my head.  And to be honest, I love it too.  It feels great and distinctive.  And friends and family noticed.  And bought me more.

And that is how I came to own eight of these damn hats in different colors.  And I love it. It’s surreal and silly and wonderful.  I love the crown signifies a form of playfulness that undercuts and emphasizes the way that I’m absurd and serious in so many other aspects of my life.  It feels like the best kind of armor, bested only by….a jumpsuit.

If you’d told me I’d own five jumpsuits at the end of the year I’d have laughed at you.  I’d bought one for my Halloween costume in 2019—I was one of the tethered from Jordan Peele’s horrifying film Us—but the grownup professional romper wasn’t what I was imagining.  Until I saw a few friends in them and realized there could be something about this.  A jumpsuit for me is a direct response to the caftan of the last two years.  A caftan hides and embraces and rejects hard lines in favour of comfort and domestic lounging.  A jumpsuit stays comfortable, but embraces pantlegs. It becomes instead a full vestment that bonds to me and allows me to walk and move freely and snarkily.  And they feel so goddamn strong and wonderful.  I wore one to my first VAMP speaker’s night, and then one day teaching, and I was hooked.

The jumpsuit makes me feel like a strange superhero.  It’s a battle-ready costume that gives me range to move and attack and defend and retreat.  It also feels comfortable as fuck and is basically socially acceptable pajamas.  I love it, and I feel powerful as hell in it.

And God help me when I combine the two.  Although the one student who said this combination of pink hat and jumpsuit made me look like “Princess Peach’s mechanic” was brilliant and hateful and correct.

 Feeling Safe in this Body

Of course, my muscles and my fabrics couldn’t protect me from the many, many diseases still lurking, a fact I learned when I fell ill with covid just after Easter 2022.  I honestly felt just a slight sniffle, and very infrequent cough.  It all could’ve been chalked up to pollen count, except for the chills I had one night after a requisite 5 mi (8km) walk.  Two home tests and a PCR later---yup.  I had it.  I felt afraid and ashamed and confused and angry.  Like I’d ruined some sort of perfection that I was supposed to maintain.

Infuriatingly, I didn’t actually get sicker.  I got better immediately, and found myself confined to my house with virtually no symptoms after day two, although I wouldn’t test negative for ten full days.  I tried to remind myself that it was not a moral failing to fall ill, but I owed it to others to protect them, and I succeeded for the most part.  Remote teaching was anxiety-enducing, but it worked all right.  I learned to sit in my house in so many different caftans (2021 redux!), and be kind to my body, which was struggling to keep me safe, thanks to the vaccines I’d received.

After my recovery, I felt briefly relaxed and then very afraid I’d contract it again.  My flights to Fiji and New Zealand were scary—especially after a brief cold, but I was all right.  I was sure to get my bivalent booster and feel as safe as I could, and be as responsible as possible.  But I had no idea how emotionally unprepared I was for the other virus.

Monkeypox swept across the globe at the end of May, and I was horrified and terrified as I watched the numbers climb precipitously in the summer of 2022.  I immediately stopped sexual and most physical contact, and then cried as I felt like I was returning to my sense of isolation and fear again, even while others weren’t.  And finally, when the government offered vaccines, or hope—they were achingly, infuriatingly slow.  I couldn’t get one for nearly all of August, and I was so scared, and so angry that another virus would hit me, hurt me, hurt others.  I felt singled out as a queer, and even more alone.

I sat in those clinics twice this fall, getting stuck with needles that left permanent marks in my arms like the faint bruises my drunken father would give me after he got home on a school night.  But the weird pain and violence kept me safe, unlike him.  I felt that giving my body these shots and protections would keep this body safe, would make these things more endurable.

This year took my body to a series of confusing and strange places.  But I’m still incredibly grateful that I survived it, festooned my body, and celebrated its strength.  Just ask Dr. Himbo, your favourite intellectual beefcake.

[theteej]

Telling Stories

A storytelling event? In a hipster bar in South Park? How did something I barely knew about in 2021 become one of the most prominent parts of my 2022?

It all started innocently enough, when my long time friend Dustin messaged me, insisting I contribute something to the speaking showcase.  What was the theme, I asked, momentarily interested.  I’d heard of Vamp the month before and had watched the videos of other people I knew in San Diego speak from the month before—salacious stories about sex and relationships, as fit for a February showcase.

“Check it, fam.  It’s called ‘Good Hearted White Folx.’”

Well, fuck.  Now I was in.

I sat on my couch, fiddling with my computer, typing, retyping, stressing, clattering keys.  I thought about the time my errant 2013 blog post titled “There Are No Good White People” became a lightning rod for enraged Trump supporters after 2016.  I thought about four years living and working in rural Virginia. I thought about the casual exhaustion of anti-Blackness even in a space filled with white hipsters who liked beers and story telling.  I pieced something together.  And found myself a few weeks later sitting in a stranger’s dining room editing my story along with six other storytellers.

It was an addictive experience.

Vamp is, at its core, an engaging community writing project.  As part of a larger organization, So Say We all, the monthly Thursday night speaking showcase allows us to think about ourselves and present them in a space ready to go on a journey with you.  And as soon as I found myself that Thursday evening in March, in front of a microphone and telling a whole story that was a challenge and a call to arms, and a chance to be sassy in a jumpsuit, I KNEW I WAS HOOKED.

Basically, if you find your submitted story selected, you work with the other story tellers during the month in two long critique sessions and make edits.  You also are assigned a performance coach who will help polish your story into something more effective.  The notes are of course voluntary, but they really do make for better stories, and I find that the whole process is incredibly fascinating—you build bonds with people, feel connected, and make something palpable with people.  It’s great.

I did three Vamp performances this year—One for Good Hearted White Folx in March, one for Whoa Mama in May, and one for Beast Mode in October.  I’m scheduled to do one in January 2023 (theme: Ctrl + Z). Along the way I also worked as a performance coach in November and helped pick 2023 themes.  It’s become a thing for me, which is wild.  

The actual performance night is a tingly, magical experience.  You’re at a bar, drinking, and you get to hear stories, take part in a collective experience, and feeling something palpable that crackles with energy and joy and danger and hilarity and occasionally horniness.  There’s a particular thrill in watching a first time storyteller discover the power and pleasure of their own voice, and to feel the joy that comes with it every time.  It’s an art and a laugh and a joy and I can’t stop doing even if I wanted to.

I think even more importantly for me has been the sense of community that has come out of it.  San Diego is a strangely atomized place, made worse by being in my thirties and in the social confusion after the more isolating phases of the pandemic.  Finding a cohort of weirdos wanting to work on a community event has been powerful, and has put me in reach of new people that I want to know better, that I want to find new words with, that I want to explore stories of my own with.  

Vamp is absolutely an imperfect space, but it has the opportunity to offer connections and a sense of place that is rare and deeply compelling.  Two weeks ago a woman stopped me in Trader Joe’s and told me that she loved my October story.  The mother of a teenager emailed me out of the blue to tell me that she’d seen the video recording of my May story about my mom and that it made her feel less alone and that far more confident about what she was doing as a parent. Both of these caught me out.  I’m not a celebrity. I’m a nerd who loves jumpsuits and a well-turned phrase at a cocktail party.  But there’s an incredible moment where your words travel from you, through that microphone, and become something else.  It’s a sonic alchemy that still moves me, and makes me feel something like hope.

As a deeply cynical person, and one who does not think that stories are inherently redemptive, I must admit that the ability to share words with folks and hold people in a shared dream for a brief time is nonetheless a joy that I and others desperately need. Vamp has been doing that for me, and I hope I do more of it in 2023.

[theteej]

Step by Step

In December of 2021, at the advice of a friend, I started walking as an off-gym day exercise, as promptly lost my goddamn mind.

Those first few walks weren’t very remarkable, just two to three mile jaunts down Adams Avenue, the street I live on.  I walked from Normal Heights to Kensington, past grocery stores, hipster cafes, aging apartments, and the like.  Nothing auspicious.

I seriously didn’t plan to walk so damn much, but it quickly became intoxicating.

There was suddenly for me, a project I could undertake with relative ease and lack of practice, and see relatively rapid results. Two miles could become three, which could become five.  And there was something particularly amazing about feeling your body just moving through space.  

As I walked, I felt keenly about what theorist Sara Ahmed first described about taking up space:

Each time I move, I stretch myself out, trying this door, looking here, looking there…It is a process of becoming intimate with where one is: an intimacy that feels like inhabiting a secret room that is concealed from the view of others.

Walking suddenly did this for me.  I could feel each step on the pavement, as I wandered down residential streets, and later across broad avenues and narrow lanes.  I could just exist for two, three, four hours. I just heard the music in my ears and the feel the sun on my face, and feel my body moving.  And yes, it was exercise, but ultimately it was this body taking up space, moving through places, figuring things out, that felt so right.  

As someone who is frequently anxious, I find that my mind gets tied up on a repeating track.  It’s like a computer virus scanning program that’s gone horribly awry; it will keep scanning for dangers, threats, analyzing, endlessly repeating. Everything is to be checked or underlined, or double-scanned.  My brain seeks so frequently to keep me safe, ever since I was a little kid dealing with a violent father and an uncertain day to day.  My anxiety has kept me safe, but more often than not, it keeps me tired.  I am always on the horizon, searching, checking, double checking.  Is this pimple actually monkeypox?  Is this a sniffle or covid? Do I have cancer? Are people mad at me? Have I fucked it up so badly that everyone thinks I’m a piece of shit?

Walking helps short circuit that.  I feel the soft impact of my feet on the ground as I push past each house or tree or concrete marker.  I hear music and feel air in my lungs and rejoice in my body’s responses.  I move and breathe and triumph. My lizard brain relaxes.  The scanning recedes into the background. I feel grounded.  When I was at my most overwhelmed and struggling in rural Virginia, my therapist would encourage me to go outside and feel my feet on the ground. “Feel how rooted you are,” she said softly. “Your body is connected. You’re not floating away, you’re not being sept along the current. You are here.”  Each step takes me a bit closer to that, and I love it.  

Of course, I couldn’t help but make it a competition. By late January and early February I was trying to walk as much as possible.  The long winter break combined with the omicron surge meant I had limited interactions, and my body yearned for more. I began walking six miles, eight miles, ten miles.  I planned my grocery or pharmacy or bank errands around them and left the car at home. I walked to restaurants five miles away---City Heights, Old Town, Little Italy. I walked at one point forty-seven miles in one week.  I began to feel badly if I didn’t reach my target distances, like I’d failed.  I’d taken the joys of walking, and turned it into something to surveil or challenge or threaten.  

I sighed, picked myself back up, and remembered that wasn’t the point.  The point was the exploration, to see the city in new refractions.  I began challenging myself to take ten photos on every walk, just to make the experience palpable.  I shared them on Instagram.  My friend LaKedra jokingly started calling them #talliethemiles, and so an absurd hashtag was born.  Then when I went for walks in Fiji and Aotearoa this summer, the requisite #talliethekilometers also had to join the fun.

To my surprise, people really reacted to these walking posts.  Friends around the world started taking their own walks, and sending me photos.  I became increasingly delighted at the idea of allowing my eyes to look for new creative outlets.  How might a simple leaf or an errant sign or a slant of light be a cause for attention and recording?  It allowed me to feel part of something bigger and more fun, and allowed me to decrease my weird obsession with competing.  Occasionally I’d run into people here in San Diego while walking. They’d look at me and then conspiratorially whisper, “wait, are you on one of your walks now?  I’ve been watching them,” they’d say, as if I were some brand name influencer instead of a beefy professor wanting to find moments of peace and beauty while also enjoying his body and the space around him.  Honestly, these walks, and the weird community formed around them, has sustained me more than anything else this year.  And it’s beautiful to feel like it’s something simple, free, and healing.

I think my favourite song this year for my walks was Heart of My Own by Basia Bulat. It’s a guitar driven folk song, and I like her aching voice as I walk, step by step out of my constantly humming mind and into the future.  If I can hold the thinking at bay for a bit, my heart and lungs can keep pace, and who knows? I might find something else new and beautiful.  Maybe I’ll run into you.

If I go, what do I hold? It is work to be dancing out here If tomorrow I'm mending the empty bones There are roses that come without seeking

[theteej]

Islands Away

I clutched my passport and vaccine card in my hand as I wound my way through the airport queues.  I hadn’t travelled internationally in three years, and here I was, leaving for nearly five weeks to the South Pacific.  What the hell was I thinking?!

I first travelled to Aotearoa/New Zealand in 2017 as an exhausted and somewhat broken professor at Washington and Lee in Virginia. Aotearoa shaped me in some profound and confusing ways.  It was my first long-term international work trip outside of the UK or Southern Africa, where I’d undertaken all of my PhD and book research.  This was new, the first steps toward my next book, Conjugal States, which explores how monogamy and polygamy were understood and deployed in colonial contexts ranging from South Africa to Aotearoa to Canada and parts of the U.S.  I realized I had so much more to learn, and when I first touched down in the new country I was humbled by the constant generosity of people, challenged by the similarities and differences of colonial violence in a space new to me, and excited by growing as a scholar and a person.  My dear friends Rachel and David made space in their hearts and lives, and welcomed me back in 2019 when I came back for follow-up research in Wellington. This was a chance to build on two months of research, to decide what I was really looking for, and to become reacquainted with old friends.

This trip would be different, however.  My dear friend Mark Daku, who I first met as a graduate student in South Africa, was closing out his time in Fiji, where he and his partner had been for two years.  In characteristic Mark fashion, he said, “look, why don’t you just come? There’s plenty of relevant work here to discuss for your research. You can also give a talk here at the University of the South Pacific, and you can just be here for awhile.  You’re in the same time zone as New Zealand, anyway.  Do it.”

So….I did it.  I applied for summer travel funding, and I went. I found myself for the first time in three years, feeling excited as I left the United States and headed far, far away—albeit this time with a mask and a healthy amount of pandemic anxiety where I hoped that my April bout of covid would help me resist re-infection in the two newly re-opened countries.

As the plane doors closed that Saturday night in July, I found myself remembering that slightly ominous passage by Agatha Christie in And Then There Were None:

“There was something magical about an island—the mere word suggested fantasy. You lost touch with the world—an island was a world of its own. A world, perhaps, from which you might never return.”

I had never been to Fiji before, and as the intense humidity engulfed me like a wet blanket, despite the ostensible Southern Hemisphere winter, I took an instinctive deep breath in.  I had flown thirteen hours and nineteen time zones around the world and found myself in a place I’d only read about for work.  And yet, it was surreal.  The indigenous peoples of Fiji, iTaukei, bear more than a passing resemblance to me.  We both have the same slightly coppery skin tone and a similar hair curl pattern. Historically, thanks to colonial naming practices, iTaukei also frequently identified as Black, and it was therefore particularly disorienting to arrive in a country where people looked like you, had similar bigger body types, and things seemed like echoes of things you already knew.  As a mixed-race Black American there’s a frequent misrecognition that my body undergoes; but there’s also a sense of not really looking like anyone else. I look like my white mother and my Black father, but I also don’t.  I found myself looking into faces and walking along the streets of Suva and Nadi trying to see familiarity and difference.

People often asked me if I was from Tonga, another nearby nation, which was confusing, too.  The misrecognition continued apace.  It was strange and beautiful to be in the somewhat sleepy but also oddly busy capital city of Suva, as I walked with Mark and Jenn and their irrepressibly cheery dog, Pirate.  I walked through freak sunshowers that left me drenched, I ate a terrifying number of coconuts.  I slipped slightly out of veganism to try Kokoda, a Fijian fish dish that resembled ceviche, served with chiles and cassava.  It was amazing.  I drank kava and rum and tried to learn everything I could.  What did it mean to wander streets marked with so many familiar colonial names I knew from South Africa and the UK?  What did it mean to move through a country that had endured four coups since 1987, that felt the racial fault lines from British colonialism and Indian indenture migration?  There were so many parallels to South Africa.  There were so many ways in which my brown and inquisitive body moved through narrow alleyways and along beach paths and just smiled in the bright sunshine, trying to understand and learn.  It was an indescribable joy to be back with my dear friend Mark, who truly gets me in a way that most other people don’t.  We’d been travel companions a decade earlier as anxious graduate students; now we were a little more grown, and trying to figure out everything.  But Mark always knows exactly how to reach me with his love of the absurd and the asinine, and his sharp wit and generous heart make me think in new ways, even if his somewhat sunny cynicism is a weird counterpart to my own.

I met dear and wonderful people, academics like Milla building new generations of scholars and giving words for experiences; effortlessly kind cinephiles like Ben, whose passion for music and art were infectious; brilliant climate change activists like Dylan, determined to make Fiji a better and more just place for the future.  I wandered and laughed and cried and….for the first time in three years, actually rested. I stopped. I breathed in, I felt the sun on my face and I tried to accept the surreal gift of a paid academic trip to think and talk and process and exist. I still can’t believe it happened, and it was such a beautiful offering of sun and healing to my battered body before the work and joy of another return to Aotearoa.

After ten days, I left the daily 85 degree (30 Celsius) weather of Fiji for the middle of an Aotearoa in a proper winter.

New Zealand, known in the language of the Indigenous Māori people as Aotearoa, “Land of the Long White Cloud,” is still one of the places that makes my heart catch in my throat when I’m there.  It continues to feel like a home in a way I’m never fully prepared for, and it draws me back and challenges me in new ways every time.  What does it mean to be a non-indigenous Black person, and how do I make moments of commonality and community? How do I navigate colonialism? How do I bring my knowledge to bear as a historian of the colonial nineteenth century and Indigenous autonomy?  I’ve been working as a historian of colonial Aotearoa now for nearly five years, and the impostor syndrome is strong. I don’t’ want it to go away anytime soon, because I have to be accountable to a world that is not mine, to a place bigger than me, and to navigate a place filled with people living and surviving and making space.  

I was initially supposed to land in Auckland for a brief layover and then fly on to Wellington where I’d stay with my friends Rachel and David.  Yet unseasonably strong winds had grounded all remaining flights for the day between Auckland and Wellington, and so I found myself stuck in the city for the next twenty-four hours.  This would’ve been bothersome or an inconvenience in other instances, but my dear friend Karen (who is also Rachel’s mother!), answered my anxious text message and insisted I come home to stay with her for the night.  She showed up almost immediately, hugged me close and told me “welcome home,” pushed me out of her hair and directed me from her brilliant home in Otahuhu toward trails and places I remembered in the city centre, outside the famous Auckland War Museum.  I admit I cried in the airport when it hit me that I had family in Aotearoa. Karen (along with Rachel, David, and David’s parents as well)—had in many ways adopted me as their errant North American relative, and after the last three years I felt particularly grateful as well as vulnerable.  Karen and I chatted about her work in education and mine in anticolonial history. As always, she made space, and invited me into her life, and shared her kindness along with her copious mugs of tea.

The next day began my two and a half weeks in Wellington, where I stayed with my dear friends (or Rachel, as we waited for David to return from a trip in Europe), and got right to work in the archives.  This was my third trip to the New Zealand National Archives, and I spent most days tracking down records of bigamous marriages, matrimonial infidelity, and the challenges of Māori and Pākehā (European) claims on belonging and family estates.  It’s honestly the best fucking thing I get to do.

Research is the best part of the gig; there are no onerous responsibilities, only joy.  You get to take in information and think and ponder and leave the analysis to some future version of yourself, sad in front of a laptop in a local café.  Too bad, future T.J.!  This is a time for DREAMS.  I traced so many stories, and journeyed through archival trails.  I got to reconnect with friends I hadn’t seen in years, including Matthew, Avery, Corry and Charlie, and generally felt so happy to be back in a place that brings me joy.  After a brief and scary episode where David tested positive for covid on his return and we all had to isolate, we went on an epic work and joy filled road trip.

First we headed to Te Waipounamu (the South Island) and the city of Christchurch (Ōtautahi), where I explored the next archival repository for documents, tried new vegan restaurants, visited a kitschy French-themed tourist site, and just sat and cried in the beautiful amber lights of a winter sunset with friends who made me feel safe.  While there I splurged and bought a stuffed handmade wool octopus that I named Te Wheke, the Māori word for octopus (original, I know).  He’s now a dear and constant companion.

We headed back to Te Ika-a-Māui (the North Island) for the final week, I double checked documents in Auckland, and I also finalized my most ambitious plan yet—to formally apply for the 2024 Fulbright to come back and spend time back in Te Waipounamu for six months.  I made arrangements with colleagues at the University of Otago, applied, and held my breath.  We’ll see what happens.  If it works, I’ll get the last documents read in Dunedin, work on developing competency in te reo Māori (the Māori language), and teach an African history class.  I’ll be able to come back to another wonderful place that makes me feel like I’m home and can breathe once again.

When the time came, Rachel and Karen and David all saw me off to the airport.  “You’re family, and that’s what we do,” Karen said with a smile.  Te Wheke and I shuffled down to departing flights, and I cried a little.  I can’t wait to come back home again.  I’m so glad I got to breathe and recover, and find another space after so many years of exhaustion.  Sometimes an island is not a fantasy, but a place you can return to, over and over again, bringing something new each time.