quovadis

The truth of that book, however, is obviously no more objective than any work of art, but perhaps dictated by experience. Hjorth has a favourite story to illustrate her sense of that. “After Picasso painted Guernica, his huge painting of the bombing of the town, one of Franco’s generals happened to stand with him in front of the painting. The general said ‘Did you do that?’ ‘No,’ Picasso answered, ‘you did.’” She finds it amazing that the idea of objective truth has persisted, when it comes to the perception of complex events. “Fiction is not true in the sense that journalism [tries to be true]” she says. “It is true in another sense. There is nothing like a neutral view. We start to read each other from the moment we meet. Fiction reveals that. Knausgaard, for example, shows how his character meets the world…”

In June 2025, the Clifton House held a weekend celebration of Clifton’s life and legacy starting on her birthday, co-sponsored by Jupiter. The gathering was called “All of My Bones Remember,” after the following lines in Clifton’s 1972 poem “africa,” which read: home oh home the soul of your variety all of my bones remember This is a knowing deeper than words. Clifton remembers that to be home is to be within a polyvocal continent whose variety feels almost incomprehensible in comparison to this country’s circumscribed notions of Blackness.

Many of Bambara’s most quoted—and often misunderstood—lines deal with the topic of revolution. Another highly decontextualized quote comes from Bambara’s introduction to the 1970 anthology The Black Woman, where she wrote that “revolution begins with the self, in the self.” This has been used to defang revolution, presenting it as individual wellness rather than as collective action. But Bambara also said: “As a cultural worker who belongs to an oppressed people, my job is to make revolution irresistible.” Taken together, these two quotes show revolution as a dialectic between self and the “oppressed people” to which one belongs. Revolution cannot be dependent on a single body. Making revolution irresistible means showing others what it might feel like to live in a postrevolutionary society where basic needs are met and no single person is sacrificed to the needs of their family or community. For Bambara, this process began with the self—though, crucially, it didn’t end there. Nikky Finney recalls that Bambara gave the writers at Pamoja this advice: “Y’all spending too much time cleaning your house when you should be sitting at your desk.” Zoe Bambara and her mother have inherited her grandmother’s priorities. Zoe sleeps with pens and notepads, as well as pots and pans from eating hurried meals in bed. “The work comes first. […] There’s a lot of stuff that could be done,” she says. She views “community care as self-care.” These words and actions made me think of a scene in The Salt Eaters in which Bambara describes the role of community in healing an individual: [S]ometimes a person held on to sickness with a fiercesomeness that took twenty hard-praying folk to loosen. So used to being unwhole and unwell, one forgot what it was to walk upright and see clearly, breathe easily, think better than was taught, be better than one was programmed to believe—so concentration was necessary to help a neighbor experience the best of herself or himself. For Black women trained in self-sacrifice, it is often easy to forget that your neighbors want you to be whole and will help you. Revolution and care, as conceived by Bambara, are a mutual font of energy flowing into and out of an individual.

Writers who try to do this work are told that our words don’t mat­ter. When we demand a ceasefire and an end to occupation, we are told that those words are meaningless, that they do not prompt action, and that they cause tremendous injury (as in, to demand a ceasefire or to demand that the genocide in Gaza end is to cause injury and not to demand the cessation of injury). To name a per­son, institution, state, or a set of acts as racist or anti-Palestinian or antiblack is to cause injury. It is not the racism that injures, it is not the bullets and bombs that injure, it is the words that seek to name the injury—that name a murderous structure like apartheid or settler colonialism—that cause injury. Meaning is in crisis. And we are embroiled, everywhere, in contests over meaning—which are also contests of power, contests over living. And dying. — Christina Sharpe

Craft tells us to modu­late our words. Craft tells us that if “we” do it well enough, “they” will listen. Craft tells us to be silent about genocide.— Christina Sharpe

“Sometimes you don’t survive whole, you just survive in part. But the grandeur of life is that attempt. It’s not about that solution. It is about being as fearless as one can, and behaving as beautifully as one can, under completely impossible circumstances.” — Toni Morrison