Hi every body, it’s your friendly neighborhood me.
It’s been a while since I published something here, but I have been notching some publishing credits elsewhere. Tryna build my lil resume. Most excitingly, I have a essay (and maybe poem??) being published in issue 20 of Logic(s) coming out in December in, “the first queer Black and Asian tech magazine. Logic(s) goes beyond mere critique to serve as a beacon of new possibilities—helping to understand how technology has re-ordered people’s lives for better and worse, and where we go from here.”
I’ve spent damn near the last half year working on this piece, and I’m proud of it, and also never wanna see it again hahahaha but I am excited for y’all to see it. It’s a weird and lovely and visceral piece and ever since writing it I’ve been thinking about how I’ve stolen myself back from the life I was “supposed” to have.
Support Logic(s) buy purchasing an issue, or previewing it! Here are 3 recommendations:
Queer Black Infiltration by Bones Jones
From the Sasha into the Zamani: Death as a Moment of Radical Continuity by Zainab Aliyu
Khat Time and Earthen Houses: Reconnecting to Oromo Sacred Knowledge Traditions by Galaan Hayle
As always, shout out to Uncle Jimmy, & my mama without whom I would be dead.
-Omo
P.S. I have been reading a lot about death lately??
Recommendations from my reading list are
Wail Song by Chaun Webster
In The Wake: On Blackness and Being by Christina Sharpe
Raising The Dead: Readings of Death and (Black) Subjectivity by Sharon Patricia Holland
Fear of Black Consciousness by Lewis R. Gordon
As I read I have been prompted to consider death in new ways, and the relationship of black people (in general), and myself (in specific) to death- particularly social death and the borders between the lands of the black living and the black dead. I first started thinking about this consciously while I was writing Moses & the Logics of Empire in transnational adoption (which, fun story, almost got published in Christianity Today). At least… I tell myself that. I have a bad habit of submitting stuff to get published, advancing to a latter round in their decision making process, getting rejected, and then in anger just self publishing the shit to prove to myself that my shit cold af. That is what I did with the pre-quel to the piece in Logic(s) , called Don’t You Know You Were Stolen. ANYWAYS. clearly for the last year+ i have been preoccupied with expanding my own conceptual framework of what it means to steal, to die, to live. To bogart.
How do you come alive if you are “narratively condemned” (Wynter) to social, psychic, physical, and other forms of, death? For me it has meant beginning with stealing my body and mind back & writing a neo-slave narrative in my wake. I don’t wanna say much more about what I mean, you’ll just have to read my shit in Logic(s), okayyy?
Dear reader, how are you stealing yourself back from those who sought to take you (for granted, for stupid, from yourself)?
i read your Logic piece & came here to subscribe! it's really wonderful—congrats.