theteej

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Screenshots of Kieran Culkin on The Graham Norton show, casually adding to the absolutely wild Eric Bogosian lore

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Night Flight | Marge Piercy

Vol de nuit: It’s that French phrase comes to me out of a dead era, a closet where the bones of pets and dried jellyfish are stored. Dreams of a twenty-year-old are salty water and the residual stickiness of berry jam but they have the power to paralyze a swimmer out beyond her depth and strength. Memory’s a minefield. Saint Exupery was a favorite of my French former husband. Every love has its season, its cultural artifacts, shreds of popular song like a billboard peeling in strips to the faces behind, endearments and scents, patchouli, musk, cabbage, vanilla, male cat, smoked herring. Yet I call this colbalt and crystal outing, vol de nuit. Alone in a row on the half empty late plane I sit by the window holding myself. As the engines roar and the plane quivers and then bursts forward I am tensed and tuned for the high arc of flight between snowfields, frozen lakes and the cold distant fires of the clusted stars. Below the lights of cities burn like fallen galaxies, ordered, radial, pushing. Sometimes hurtling down a highway through the narrow cone of headlights I feel moments of exaltation, but my night vision is poor. I pretend at control as I drive, nervously edging that knowledge I am not really managing. I am in the hands of strangers and luck. By flight he meant flying and I mean being flown, totally beyond volition, willfully. We fall in love with strangers whose faces radiate a familiar power that reminds us of something lost before we had it. The braille of the studious fingers instructs exactly what we have succumbed to, far too late to close, to retract the self that has extruded from us naked, vulnerable and sticky, the foot, the tentative eyestalked head of the mating snail. To fall in love so late is dangerous. Below, lights are winking out. Cars crawl into driveways and fade into the snow. Planes make me think of dying suddenly, and loving of dying slowly, the heat loss of failure and betrayed trust. Yet I cast myself on you, closing my eyes as I leap and then opening them wide as I land. Love is plunging into darkness toward a place that may exist.

[theteej]

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Belonging and the Future: Thinking through Anti-queer Violence

T.J. Tallie, University of San Diego

I followed the discussion of the defacing of the NWU Potchefstroom campus pride flag with interest this week.  As a professor, I find incidents like this one an increasingly and depressingly common occurrence on university campuses of late.  But events here in Southern California, where I work, prompted me to think about this more broadly as part of a larger set of responses, particularly at white and settler institutions.

This week in California, two separate events echoed the Potch incident.  First was the murder of Laura Ann Carleton, the owner of a local boutique who was shot by an assailant displeased with the prominent Pride flag she displayed at her business.  Carleton’s killing was widely reported in international media, and people have begun to opine at large upon the significance of increasing conservative rhetoric demonizing LGBTQ+ people as ‘groomers’ or threats at large to the whole of American society.  The second event was less reported, but still noteworthy; over 150 protestors marched from the Los Angeles City Hall to the headquarters of the Los Angeles Unified School District, where the city’s Board of Education was holding a routine meeting.  The protestors explicitly demonstrated against LGBTQ+ education and programming in the LAUSD, which is the second largest public school district in the United States after New York City.  That a large protest in an ostensibly progressive city and state would occur explicitly as an anti-queer counterattack in education seems at first incongruous.  But the killing of Carleton and the protests themselves represent a larger trend in the United States in particular.  These incidents, along with the Potch pride flag defacement, offer insight into a particular kind of backlash that exists at the intersections of historically white settler societies and around the larger anxieties and contestations over who claims the present, and indeed, the future.

When interviewed, the LAUSD demonstrators framed their rationale specifically through a lens of futurity and protection.  “We believe that there is a radical indoctrination system that has seeped from academia and now into K through 12. We’ve been trying to get kiddie porno smut books out of the schools. And we don’t want people to talk about sex with our children without telling us and behind our backs,” San Diego-based protestor Ben Richards asserted.  While such a statement may initially appear to a bit of a confusing word salad, the argument coheres around an idea that the child is under threat, and with it, the future of the settler colonial state.  It is not a coincidence that the infamous 2017 Charlottesville protests, themselves on a historically white campus founded by slaveowner Thomas Jefferson, emphasized specifically about ‘not being replaced,’ and securing a future for ostensibly white people and their children.

It is not surprising if we see these overall phenomena as linked; the idea of protecting ‘a future’ by also displacing onto expressions of queerness the fears of an unstable white and colonial future. Protecting ‘children’ from the fear of a destabilizing queer future is a well-worn track of political rhetoric.  To unpack this idea, I turned to three theorists: Lee Edelman, Cathy Cohen, and Judith Butler.  For Cathy Cohen, white supremacy and heteronormativity function hand-in-hand as a way to justify the occupation of indigenous lands and spaces.  The normalization and justification a settler project is one that must first normalize the violences committed in the creation of the state, and then secondarily seek to defend it as inevitable by making sure that the next generation can inherit it without question.  In her work, this means that both people of color and queer people themselves can become threats to the perceived order of a white settler society, and can be subject to violence and persecution in order to keep the colonial society functioning as normal.[1]

Indeed, settler societies naturalize the violence of their existence by continuing to attempt to secure a future in colonial landscapes.  To do this requires investing in an imagined sense of future straightness.  As Edelman argued in his 2004 polemic No Future, queerness is often seen to those invested in the status quo of a colonial nation state as something fundamentally troubling and threatening to the orderly control of power from one generation to the next.  Thus, the occupation of indigenous lands and spaces becomes a project that must be upheld daily and secured for the next generation to come, the always in the distance ‘child’ who must be protected.[2]  For Butler, compulsory heterosexuality, then, is advanced by its proponents as the only real form of existence.  It must constantly reproduce what was created before it—and it is constantly on the brink of failure.  The stakes are high for such a project.  The world of straightness must be made and remade, constantly, it must be defended and protected, or the future is at risk.[3] 

This is why Laura Ann Carleton, even though she herself identified as straight, put the world and the future at risk for the shooter who saw her flag in front of her boutique.  By claiming space and a future for LGBTQ+ identified people, Carleton aligned herself with queerness, with a threat to the generations of security offered in by colonial society.  As Edelman argues, such a type of identification is unthinkable in the settler world of the colonial future, and instead is outside the only possible accepted world, that of “fighting for the children.”[4]

As I think through these moments of violence, of protest, and of rupture as a historian, I offer not a simple set of solutions or strategies, but a reminder that these are contestations in real time over who belongs, and over the very stakes of who can claim a future.  The Potchefstroom campus where the pride flag incident occurred, of course, is not exempt from its own settler histories.  Before its 2004 merger with other campuses to create North-West University, Potchefstroom was a historically white and Afrikaans religious institution, and could boast F.W. de Klerk and Pieter Mulder (of Freedom Front Plus) among its alumni.  The transformation of a campus that existed explicitly for the promotion of an Afrikaner Christian minority into part of the third largest university system in a democratic South Africa undoubtedly also creates a systematic series of anxieties about future, belonging, and place for a variety of stakeholders.  I am not arguing explicitly that the perpetrator must therefore be an aggrieved member who feels that they are losing power or place within society. I am, however, specifically arguing that the Potch incident also underlines larger questions about the future and who asserts claims of belonging.  Edelman, Cohen, and Butler all apply in thinking about the futurity and the histories of exclusion that animate a campus, even in its ostensible post-transformation moment.

Thus, the larger question I offer in light of these three incidents are not how could these things happen, but rather, how do Carleton, LAUSD, and Potch all cause us to think about the larger and more immediate stakes of belonging? These are more than just minor debates over flags and education, they are about who can and will exist in frameworks created by colonial violence. 

------

BIO: T.J. Tallie is an Associate Professor of African History at the University of San Diego.  They are the author of Queering Colonial Natal: Indigeneity and the Violence of Belonging in Southern Africa (Minnesota, 2019).

[1] Cathy J. Cohen, “Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer Politics?,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 3, no. 4 (May 1997): 437–65.

[2] Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2004).

[3] Judith Butler, “Imitation and Gender Subordination,” in Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories, ed. Diana Fuss, illustrated edition (New York: Routledge, 1991), 312–13.

[4] Edelman, No Future, 2–3.

[theteej]

We have to talk about white (and nonBlack) people posting August 5/chair memes

Sigh. Here we are again.

In December 2020, I wrote about why it was a problem, and so uncomfortable for white people sharing Twisted Tea memes.

For those who may not recall, the Twisted Tea memes were created in response to a Black person using the TT to push back forcefully against white racist violence. The images became particularly powerful because they represented a break from the normative lines of racist violence, as in white violence on Black bodies--this time it felt like rooting for the underdog. Black people, because we're clever and awesome, immediately made memes about it. Unfortunately, then white people began sharing them, and it was a profoundly uncomfortable experience. Here's why, again, briefly: Black people were sharing the memes as a cathartic experience about living under a daily lived racial terror that white people cannot ever understand or truly experience in the United States. On August 5 2023, something similar happened again, this time in Montgomery, Alabama, where a Black employee was quickly assaulted by a group of inebriated white boaters. This script is common and familiar to us as Black folks. What was different, however, was the subsequent response--a show of force from Black observers that overwhelmed and viscerally punished the white perpetrators. In many ways it functioned like a revenge fantasy, a cathartic release for people to watch the harm they regular endured or were threatened with daily, reversed in the faces of those who always felt safe. For more on the casual entitlement and innocence of whiteness, see my earlier piece here.

In the midst of the melee, a Black man wielded a folding chair and hit several white attackers. This became a moment of amusement and meme-ification, especially among Black viewers. When Black people share these, it is from a variety of perspectives: First, these are cathartic responses to the visceral, daily violences we suffer as dehumanized people in U.S. society. This disrupts the way we know it 'always goes' for us, and it is a powerful release. Second, the jokey retelling of it, also plays on Black creativity and reminds us of our truth, our stories, and our shared history of struggle and resistance. The problem is, that white (and generally non-Black) internet viewers, then also wanted to share these memes. This is a problem for a few reasons: First, these memes are generated SPECIFICALLY as a response to a type of day-to-day oppressive violence that white people (and to an extent non-Black folk, in other ways) do NOT experience. There is a reversing of racial terror that is meaningful for Black people that is not present for white users.

Second, what is also frustrating, is that this builds on a LONG history of white appropriation of Black cultural productions. Ever since slavery, white people have felt deeply entitled to the art, the work, the creativity of Black people and think that it is communal property. It is not. We are no longer legal property, and our works, our responses, our ways of being are also not communal. Third, what is also so tiresome about this is that white people sharing these images then participate in a messed up process where the white perpetrators-turned-victims in the video become 'ultimate racists,' the obvious type of bad that the white sharer of the video can psychically and performatively distance themselves from. "I'm not like THESE white people," the person can say, as they share the memes, investing in the insidious lie that racism is individual acts, rather than a vast and powerful superstructure that benefits ALL white people, albeit unequally, but at the expense of ALL Black people. In short, stop fucking sharing these memes, white people. They're not for you, and when you do, you both participate in a history of entitled theft AND you also do a shitty thing where you pretend that you don't benefit from daily white racist power. You do. Of course, after writing about this, I've already had multiple white people tell me I'm just being mean and 'reverse racist.' I don't even have time to respond to that any more, because I've already given enough of my free energy out of some misplaced goodness of my heart (and an equally misplaced hope that good faith can help us understand where we're going here.) DO better. Don't share those memes if you're not Black.

[theteej]

Easter is not my favourite holiday.

Easter is not my favourite holiday. Honestly, it’s never been one with treasured childhood memories. Rather, it was always the celebration most in tune with obligation, with suffering, with disappointment. Perhaps I should go back to the beginning.

 My paternal grandparents, Gentry Howard Tallie and Johnnie B. Tallie, were both born in Texas at the height of the Jim Crow era. They moved to Los Angeles as a young married couple with a one year old daughter, Pamela, in tow. I’ve never been led to believe that either of them were particularly devout, although both were certainly affiliated with Black Baptist spirituality in Texas. By the time I was born Johnnie B had been dead for a year and a half and Gentry, a towering man at nearly 6’5 with a booming voice and million watt smile to match, wasn’t a regular church goer. Neither were his children. Formal religious services occurred once a year, at the Easter sunrise service held at the Green Hills cemetery. Johnnie B was buried in half of the Tallie family plot, her presence resembling a half-filled parenthesis , a thought waiting to be completed by Gentry. It was as if the Tallie family saved all their formal interaction with the divine for that one moment, every spring morning, when the sun rose from the refineries and tangled machinery of Long Beach, the golden orb illuminating every piece of the harbor, from the oil tankers to the suspension bridges that covered our corner of the Pacific. Every year after Johnnie B’s burial in 1982, the Tallie clan in California made the pilgrimage to that immense acreage of rolling green lawns and scuffed headstones. Every year they’d join the throng of people, speaking English, Spanish, Khmer, Samoan, and a host of other tongues, sipping cheap coffee and watching the rising sun. Such was the Easter world that I was born into, one of loss and obligation.

 While my mother was a practicing Christian, and by the time I’d entered elementary school, my whole maternal branch of the family was attending a Japanese-American Baptist Church in Gardena, I knew that every Easter involved a mandatory trip to the field of the dead, to the rising sun, and to a performance for a woman I’d never met. My parents had by then divorced, and so my father had the task of picking me up and taking me the two miles to the graveside service, a task that he spectacularly failed to do every year. My father, Tyrone Sr, had been routinely violent throughout my parents’ marriage and my young life, and my mother and I knew that under no uncertain terms could we afford to be late on the off chance my wayward father chose that year to be the one he finally showed up on time to pick me up. Without fail, every year, we would rise at 4 am, get ready, change a grumpy child into the least pleasant formal clothing possible, and then huddle and wait, anxiously looking out the window as the dark night of the sky began to lighten, invariably into a sunrise and proof of my father’s inability to keep his promises. Some years we’d stand on the steps in front of our house, afraid we might miss him somehow and be treated to a show of yelling and abuse before we celebrated the resurrection of the Saviour. When my father inevitably showed up twenty or thirty minutes late, he would grab me and speed off from my mother, cursing under his breath as if somehow his failure to discipline time was my fault. I would push my nose against the car’s window, watching a waving maternal figure shrink into the distance of the cool spring morning. We then, without fail, would park and run up the steep, slippery grass of the cemetery and then awkwardly scan the hundreds of seats at the service to see my family, who’d always dutifully saved us seats. The service, in progress, would slowly swell into familiar preaching, warm carols, and then the inevitable releasing of doves across a pink streaked dawn sky, symbolizing Christ’s peace and the whole truth of the Resurrection. Once, in 1993, my father slapped me in the face in the car for his being late. Then the doves crapped on me at the end of the service. I never enjoyed Easter.

 What I did enjoy was my seeing my family. Easter meant dawn vigils for the faith and an awkward gathering around the grave of a woman I’d never met, but it also involved eating at one of the greatest relics to mid-century cuisine in the South Bay, the kitschy Parasol restaurant in Torrance, California. My cousins Shamika and Antwann (four and three years older than me, respectively) would laugh and tease each other, and make horrific combinations of lemon, salt, and cream in the water glasses. Then we’d return to my grandfather’s house and hunt for eggs in his scrabbly backyard, searching from the lemon and avocado trees, to the broken down van parked behind the house for the dyed orbs. I invariably lost. I was not good at this game, and as an only child, had no practice in beating out siblings with years of practice at outsmarting each other. I loved it anyway, even if it was the first of many times my family would deride me for my lack of any athletic prowess.

For me Easter was a constant exercise in mandatory observance. It was something we did, something we’d always done, and something unquestioned. When I turned sixteen I insisted on getting my driver’s license on my birthday, four days from Easter, so I could drive myself to the service and not wait for my father for the first time. To my intense irritation, the rest of the family didn’t feel well that year and decided not to attend—or tell me. I sat through the service, alone, in silence, surrounded by hundreds of people (and family friends from over the years), and for once, focused on the service. I listened to the hymns, I sang with the people around me, I watched the sun rise with hope in the midst of everything so clearly broken, I ducked when the shitting Jesus Pigeons flew overhead. I enjoyed it, for once. Then I met my family at a local coffee shop. Apparently, everyone felt well enough for pancakes, without the vigil and reminders of departed family.

 I drove to those holiday get togethers every year that I still lived in California. Park in the darkness. Wander up grassy slopes. Find family. Sit on blankets. Hear about deity after death. Watch the sun break like an egg yolk over the darkened sky. Visit the open parenthesis. Eat with those who share most of your genetic material. Repeat. I stopped going in 2009 as I was in graduate school in Illinois, but I was back two years later, around Easter, for a conference. Unexpectedly, I was also home to see my grandfather fall ill for the last time and to bury him. One last time the family went up the grassy slopes, this time to see the parentheses close. I said goodbye to the one paternal grandparent I knew and nodded a hello to the one I’d never met, and then went with everyone down for breakfast at a Coco’s coffee shop, the Parasol having long been torn down.

 I don’t have particularly fond memories of this Paschal Day in my life.  So many people see it as a time of renewal or overwhelming joy; I just can’t get into the emotional pastels that folk feel. I haven’t spoken to my father in years, but he occasionally sends me a Happy Easter text right on schedule, conveniently misremembering the sadness and fear that he pushed on me all those years. It will go unanswered as always. I am back home visiting less than five miles from that cemetery, but my ambivalence to the holiday will remain.  I’m glad that I have faith in something bigger than me, and a hope for fighting so much enormous injustice in a broken world. I am grateful that I believe in something bigger than death and despair. But every Easter I return to the complex ambivalences I held as a child, of family, of laughter, of obligation, and the incongruous rising of something new in a darkened sky while surrounded by tombs. At least this year, I’ll avoid the doves.

[theteej]

Therapy was...a lot today. I've been struggling in particular with the fact that after 6 weeks of very concerted effort to be vulnerable and open and put myself out there and meet people, things have been rather mixed overall. I went on well over 20 dates with 8 different people and most of them seem to have petered out more generally , and people that I had genuine emotional connections with have often ghosted me or emotionally withdrawn, or had complicated feelings and ended the potential. I came to therapy both very honest in my frustration and sense of genuine disappointment. Part of me wished I hadn't undergone any of the vulnerability at all because I had emotional pain and literally was as single as I had been in December. Granted, I am well aware that part of this was about experiences and getting to know more about myself and others, which wouldn't have taken otherwise. But it still feels like a strange equation to feel in many ways the end result is the same whether you had tried or not and you would probably at least been predictably disappointed had you stayed home. I confessed to my therapist that I resented her for encouraging me to do something that just made me sad. And delightfully, she took it in stride. It's very hard to continue to make oneself emotionally vulnerable and open oneself up to a variety of experiences knowing inevitably that you could be hurt. That this is all taking place while I am increasingly exhausted in the new semester is not helpful either. I know that I am a fucking catch, but it is also hard to not let my jerk brain tell me that the one constant in all of this is my general unsuitability. And despite it being painful, here I am yet again doing so, on an even broader platform. I'm trying. #teejtherapy https://www.instagram.com/p/Codl1y9pMKDJ5m2L07zrNSuO0NpmBoXN2W26700/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

[theteej]

Black Facts.

One of the many, many absurd jobs I have at my university, per my inaugural position as the director of the Africana Studies minor, is that I am the official liaison from the university to the College Board re: A.P. African American Studies. I had to come up with the plan (while abroad last summer) for how the university will credit the course when it comes online for college students. This also means that I have been subject to every goddamned email that has come out of the College Board for the last three weeks re: the course.  The backtracking, the evasions, the genuine smear campaign perpetuated by DeSantis against it, the harassment Black scholars are receiving--I am privy to it. I am doing all this during Black History Month as a Black queer professor. Who also advises the Black Student Union and the African Student Union.  Who is a Racial Equity Liaison for the university. Who is a professor of African History. Who is one of a significant but still palpable minority of Black faculty. While teaching three courses. While dealing with emotional and romantic exhaustion. While trying my damnedest to hold it all together. And I'm fucking tired. It hurts me in an existential way I can't shake. And I do too goddamned much as a Black faculty member, as a Black person. And I'm so tired. And sad. I'm tired of always trying to remind people of my humanity. I'm tired of advocating for it when if people don't get it already, they won't. I'm tired of being instrumentalized every goddamned day of my life to make points in a country, in a history, where I am not desired or loved or valued. I am weary to my bones. And I don't see any rest in sight.

[theteej]

The accuracy.

Kink isn’t shameful because of the weird sex stuff. That part’s rad. It’s shameful because it is technically improv. 

[theteej]

Today my art history professor gave some words of wisdom:

Nude is when your clothes are off. Naked is when your clothes are off and you’re up to something 

[theteej]

Seven Small Thank Yous

So much has gone on this year, but it’s very easy to forget the quotidian, the day to day experiences of building life.  And so to end this reflection on 2022, I wanted to thank six people (and a whole coffee collective) who invited me into day-to-day life, let me share joy and sorrow, hilarity and heartbreak.  I can’t thank you all enough, so I’m going to try to just say how much you meant to me this year in a few short paragraphs.

Debra Bass appeared at the most unexpected point of my life.  As I sat down to do a critical reading of my story for my first Vamp story showcase there she was, the only other Black storyteller.  We immediately did that one nod that Black folk do to each other, the one of mutual recognition, survival, and commiseration. Then we heard each other’s stories, and knew we had to be friends.  After Vamp Debra and I went on long walks, had ridiculous laughs together, and grew into that easy space that only true comrades can have.  Debra has an effortless sense of style that ranges from eclectic bohemian chic to effortless glamour.  Her locs are beautiful, her smile is radiant, and she speaks a mile a minute, her words only punctuated by wandering asides, observations, or critiques of the five words that came before.  Debra was the first real friend I feel I made after covid here in San Diego; she became my immediate ridiculous Black travel companion, because we’d both find that the other one was game for just about anything knowing we had company.  So we went to Jewish sabbath suppers, meandering art crawls, museum galas, and seasonal Black group exercise events.  We push each other to try new things—write new stories, try new art practices, examine unseen parts of ourselves.  I am also deeply delighted that she is the one who frequently wants to drive on our adventures; and I compensate by being the person that makes choices on anything from food or drink or destinations, as Debra is not super keen on making any decision that hasn’t been consulted for hours in advance like the quintessential Virgo she is.  Debra is not only brilliant, she makes me feel like I can meet any adventure head-on, as I have a friend and confidante.

Nick Dutton is an absurd human with excellent eyebrows.  Beyond that, he was my one of my students when I taught tenth grade Honors World History in 2007.  Fifteen years later, the two of us are peers; Nick is in his early thirties and trying to navigate what life means back here in San Diego, and I continuously reject the idea that I am his “Black Mr. Feeny” offering him continued life advice.  What started as a hilarious and occasional meet up has turned into a friendship that I genuinely appreciate.  Nick is hilarious and conventionally attractive in a slightly frat bro way, but he’s also a dedicated athlete who runs far more marathons than any human should, and manages to pull off some particularly devastating and clever comebacks and snark.  Nick and I have managed to meet monthly for the last year and a half, but 2022 became a year in which I cherished our get togethers.  We’d always try to find a different vegan place in San Diego, and I have grown to genuinely appreciate Nick’s honesty and thoughtfulness, and he puts up with my occasional teasing and snide rejoinders.  It’s a rare gift to watch someone grow from student to peer to friend, but my life is infinitely better for the silliness and joy Nick brings every time we meet over food without animal products and conversations with good cheer.

Arianna Haut may be one of the best things to ever have come out of winning on Jeopardy aside from meeting Alex Trebek and…you know, the cash.  Arianna and I met through the wider Jeopardy contestant community in 2021, but 2022 was where our friendship really came to shine.  She lives in L.A., and I’m often able to plan hangouts with her when I’m also up visiting my family.  More importantly, she’s someone I check in with daily, exchanging memes, anxieties, and general ridiculosity.  Having a friend who grounds you while also being utterly nonsensical themselves is such a gift, and I don’t know how to express enough gratitude for who Arianna is and what she does.  She’s a brilliant tutor and organizer, an amazing community member, and generous spirit. Some of my best moments with her have been laughing uproariously in the Museum of Jurassic Technology, eating the best tacos ever, wandering the gardens of the Huntington, or exchanging roughly eight million voice notes on facebook messenger.  She, more than anyone else, reminds me that I’m a tightly compressed ball of anxiety in a human meat suit---and that is OKAY.  There’s a depth and a kindness that I cannot fully encapsulate when I think about her and I’m endlessly grateful that she’s someone I can check in with and process and make sense of my life and vice versa.

Paul Binnie is an artist of terrifying skill, a Scotsman with a genuine mischievous charm, and a dear friend of several years.  But in 2022, he became a close and wonderful compatriot. ��He joined me on long walks around town, we talked about anxieties, and we held forth on so many different topics each more fun than the last.  Paul has forced me to look at my body in new and incredible ways as he uses his keen eye to draw models, myself included.  He’s also done the impressive work of creating a community of drawing afficionados.  I look forward most weekends to attending his queer drawing group, and I’m incredibly grateful for the friendships I’m making among the people assembled there.  Paul does more than just sketch—he also draws people into community, and I’m very grateful to have been able to see him as part of my wider family in San Diego.

Mark Kurai has been my closest friend in San Diego since both moved back in 2018, and this past year was no exception.  We’ve worked together on art projects, survived the worst of lockdowns as friends and confidantes, but more than anything, Mark is simply there. There is an incredible freedom in knowing that you have a friend nearby that you can rely on to process shit, to vent, to go for walks or coffee, or just to exist with.  Mark is a quintessential introvert, and I could not be any further from such a thing, but he does the considerably difficult job of reminding me to be quiet sometimes, to sit and think, and to be okay with mess and discomfort.  In turn, Mark lets me cajole him or push on occasion, and I am so much more balanced for being around his creativity, his patience, and his discerning eye for dialogue or photographs.  The world is a better place with a comrade and friend like him, and I’m constantly challenged by the way he methodically thinks through and processes the world around him.  I can’t think of the year without picnics or cocktails or phone calls or muddling through life—his friendship is the most quotidian and constant and I’m better for it.

I’ve known Robert Valiente-Neighbours now for nearly two decades; hell, I was his best man in 2008 at his wedding.  We both left San Diego after that, but found ourselves back a few years ago, and our friendship continued with the strength unchanged.  Robert is deeply contemplative—there’s a reason he’s a Quaker after all—but it’s more than that; he brings a quiet and meditative strength to everything he does, from his gorgeous and evocative painting and sketching and collage, to his equally dedicated pursuit of fitness.  This year Robert officially got his license as a personal trainer and with his background in nutrition, and after he launched his business, became a formal consultant for me in my strange and continued relationship with my body and strength.  Robert is aggressively disinterested in self-loathing or body transformations so en vogue in “fitness journeys.”  He emphasizes mobility and strength, and joy.  His dark eyes furrow under his brows often as he looks at me with a soft smile and says simply, “so…what do you want to be able to do with this?” Robert challenges me to think about capacity, about joy, about hope in my body. With Robert, discipline is not a product of denial or abnegation; rather, it’s an invitation to think about new ways or relating to yourself and the world around you. I think freely with him about what I want to do when I eat or move, and why I’m doing it.  I don’t think about hating or changing myself, but instead, about inviting in joy.  Likewise, meeting with him as a dear friend is one of the deepest joys I’ve experienced. Robert asks piercing questions, but also asks the same of himself.  But more than that, Robert is the definition of praxis—when one’s ideals come into practical engagement.  Whether it’s working out or prayer, eating or movies, I’m encouraged to think about what every day looks like simply with my friend, and how to be more meaningful in it all.  It’s a gift and a joy.

It’s not every day you get adopted by an entire fucking coffee shop, but Mystic Mocha is not a regular café.  Helmed by the hilarious and kind Izzy—who bears more than a passing resemblance to an everyday Jason Mamoa, hence the ‘Jason Ma-Mocha’ moniker we give him—the crew at my local café are the best and kindest people. Tuuli brings sass and wit sharper than her brilliant catseye wings. Adrian, hilarious and wildly observant, is clearly a background character on the queer pirate comedy Our Flag Means Death.  Kendall’s wide-eyed kindness belies a brilliant mind. Alyssa offers nothing but joy and chaos in equal measure and invites us to celebrate with her.  Miko is a devastatingly talented artist and cook who radiates a constant cool that you can’t help but want to be around.  Each of these amazing people invited me into daily community with coffee and chats, smiles and vegan breakfast burritos.  I wrote them a postcard from Fiji, specifically because I missed them so much, and wore a long-sleeve with the café on it when I wandered Aotearoa’s winter streets.  They came to one of my story telling events with Vamp in October. They invited me to parties and get togethers, and insisted that I was part of their little community, and I cannot say enough how much it meant to me to be seen by some of the coolest people I know.  I still think how fucking lucky I am to have met people who are not only super cool in a daily café, but also want to hangout after work, and I can’t help but smile at feeling like I’m building a community with people I genuinely think are incredible.

[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.

[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]

For such a stand, it seems, the very livability of the subject resides in its narrativizability. The postulation of the non-narrativizable poses a threat to such a subject, indeed, can pose the threat of death. I don’t think it inevitably takes the generalized form: If I cannot tell a story about myself, then I will die. But it can take this form under situations of moral duress: If I am not able to give an account of some of my actions, then I would rather die, because I cannot find myself as the author of these actions, and I cannot explain myself to those my actions may have hurt.

How am I to live under these circumstances? Perhaps death would be better than to continue to live with this inability to render myself ethical through an account that not only explains what I do but allows me to assume greater agency in deciding what to do. What is striking about such extremes of self-beratement is the grandiose notion of the transparent ‘‘I’’ that is presupposed as the ethical ideal. This is hardly a belief in which self-acceptance (a humility about one’s constitutive limitations) or generosity (a disposition toward the limits of others) might find room to flourish.

Surely there are moments of repetition and opacity and anguish, which usually compel a journey to someone—an addressee—who might receive the story and, in receiving, alter it some. The other represents the prospect that the story might be given back in new form, that fragments might be linked in some way, that some part of opacity might be brought to light. The other witnesses and registers what cannot be narrated, functioning as one who might discern a narrative thread, though mainly as one whose practice of listening enacts a receptive relation to the self that the self, in its dire straits of self-beratement, cannot offer itself.

[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