sitting tight when you're hanging in there

I don’t have the words, but I want to speak.

I don’t have a theme for this newsletter, and sitting at my kitchen table in Bochum as I write, I feel silly. I feel silly writing letters to MPs to call for a ceasefire. I feel silly posting on IG about quotidian aspects of my life, and then two moments later – watching reels of Palestinians shielding in rubble, begging for intervention from the world.

To quote Tressie McMillan Cottom, “We were not meant to see so much,” but then I immediately think, but we are seeing it. And we’re being told it’s not happening. Living through —with various degrees of impact— several geopolitical, environmental and social collapses is slowly making me become more insular, and more selfish, although I fight against it. I can feel my mind pleading: this is too much – seek distraction.

I do not have energy.
I have, really, so little power.
What can one person do?

I feel the impact of Tory rule and of austerity, poisoning my patience for the collective, and for my ability to keep trying. In England we live and learn that everything is broken, but if some people can pay for privatisation, they deserve a better experience. And what about those who cannot?

Pervasive anti-Black rhetoric makes me steel myself for what seems like inevitable discrimination. It is not normal to constantly make risk assessments for opportunities you wish to take, or have. While living here in Germany now, I walk around in perpetual flight or fight mode. I search for protests to attend on IG, having not heard a single person at my Fellowship discuss current affairs. I think about how British governments continue to poison both my micro and macro worlds.

At times like these, of witnessing war crimes while scrolling Twitter, then subsequently logging onto a Zoom meeting on research methods —the personal and political feel more detached than ever. I am personally not affected, but my politics demand me to act.

In To Exist is to Resist, Dr’s Francesca Sobande and Akwugo Emejulu write

Our struggle for our humanity is revolutionary political action that imagines another world is possible beyond the plunder, exploitation and expropriation that are the bedrock of liberal democracies. It is important to stress that Black feminism does not merely operate against violence and exclusion but creates and fosters a different way of seeing and being in this world. Black feminism is always a creative and dynamic production of thinking and living otherwise.

In the midst of the horrors, it is a Black feminist act to show up and protest imperialist violence, and live with relationality, towards yourself and others, all the ways hegemonic powers tell you it’s not possible to. Joining a protest, writing MPs letters, mutual aid — sending money to Gazans. Refusing to take the divide and conquer bait — are all tactics towards living otherwise.

It is not enough, but it is all I have.

I leave you with my favourite song of the year.