@Moyazb @crunkfeminists note to #octavia
What’s it like on the other side? Are you with all those borne of your amazing mind?
I ask because that’s what I’d like to see, you with your vision of yourself and of humanity, of what we can become beyond this place. That’s what I love about your writing. The terror of its realness as it grapples with inhumanity and offers those hard line slightly dictatorial solutions that make us on the left wrinkle our noses in distaste though we secretly root for that type of change. What if we made folks act right, like there was one person who could tug on invisible strings to make folks do right? Multiple ways of being blurring the lines and binaries. Are there two sexes? More? What if black women date and love white men or men two and three hundred years their senior and what if children have sex and race and age become of little consequence? You stretched boundaries and expanded minds with each word you penned. Made people think and made digestible queer theory and post-human theory before folks knew what they were. Opened up a flood of possibility, of alternative family structures, of genealogies, palimpsestic time. Vampires and patternmasters and apocalypses (oh my!).
I got to see you once at the Yari Yari Pambari conference in NY. I wasn’t a writer or a poet. I didn’t take English in college and at the time I hadn’t read you. But I went and crowded into the tight space with black women who knew your work, who seemed to know you or want to. They waited with baited breath for you to speak. And you did and your voice was low and rich and huge that the mic was overwhelmed and you spoke without it. Your voice literally filled the room and came from deep in the back of your body, like a whale. I can’t remember the questions asked only that they were eager, earnest, and thoughtful. The askers wanted you to know that they read that they got it that they were devoted to your work.
And then I became a believer, proselytizing myself, and shoving a copy of Parable of the Sower into the hands of people around me. We started reading for the revolution and this was our first text. It blossomed into plans to learn about the vegetation in our region as well as learn skills that will be of use when your visions come to pass. And we are quilting, cyberquilting through stitching movements together, by connecting radical women of color electronically, creating digital earthseeds poised to take root among the stars of our communities in cyber and real worlds. And we, attracted to other black women patternmasters, Erykah a prototype, wanted to link each other with invisible threads of love and quirk and so we created quirky black girls. We embrace ourselves and our eccentricity that grants us the freedom to write science fiction, to enjoy solitude, to resist the hegemonic constructions of how black girlness should look in the world. Oh and there's the combahee survival project, inspired by your creativity and your fierce feminist sistren whose 1977 statement we are reviving through activities, worksheets, projects for those who have forgotten.
And then you died. In a way that seemed almost like it came from a story you might like or maybe even write. A trip on the sidewalk in front of your house and an inopportune rock positioned to catch your falling head. Tragically natural and disturbing, like your work.
In 2012 we called you a prophet because your parables were validated and we can no longer pretend that capitalism is useful to anyone but the wealthiest of the wealthy, that this planet we’ve taken for granted will do what it needs to do to survive which may mean getting rid of us.
I want to say thank you for your words and your vision, for being brave enough to walk alone and live alone and indulge your fantasies long enough to write them down and share them with the world. I am eternally grateful for your presence and the pieces that linger on in your work and other works that it inspired.
With love and admiration,
P.S. Do you see/feel the pattern? We are growing...
