I didn’t realize until this year that I—and many of us—are constantly grieving. While grief is usually associated with loss due to death, there is a certain grief associated with living in a world that does not value life. There is a certain grief associated with the impermanence of the world, which we try to ignore. In an interview that Black Fiber & Textile Network did with adé Oni, they said: “this climate crisis is really about facing our mass addictions to permanence, and fear of death.” I would add that we are addicted to the myth of permanence. Nothing stays the same, the truth about being alive is that if you are living things are changing. What I’ve come to understand this to mean is that while we can embrace change, we are simultaneously constantly grieving what was.
Changes in nature are generative and fruitful. However, there are certain man-made changes that are violent; such as gentrification—one of the many spawns of colonialism. Moving from Oakland to Brooklyn further unearthed the grief of realizing how our environments can change so quickly that we forget what was once there. In Janelle Monae’s book The Memory Librarian, the central theme is that the ‘New Dawn’ dictatorship erases the memories of people they deem to be ‘dirty computers’—in order to clean them. Thus, remembering / memory becomes an act of resistance. The Lucille Clifton poem entitled why some people be mad at me sometimes, reads:
they ask me to remember
but they want me to remember
their memories
and i keep on remembering
mine.
As our external environments are constantly changing due to gentrification and climate change, our minds have to become an archive for what and who was. In my home I have old photos of family and books from my parents. I enjoy and appreciate nostalgia because it not only reminds me how much I’ve grown, it also allows me to cherish what was without needing things to stay the same. While I have little control on how city governments and nation states allow our external environments to be violently changed, I can design my homespace to allow me to feel held in my grief as a response to these injustices.
I recently lost a friend, unexpectedly. Although death is always shocking, losing someone before a certain age reminds me that regardless of what’s happening in the world—we all lose the people that we love. There is enough loss and grief in just being human; oppression and war is not needed to understand this. As I processed this death I marveled at my plants and the new leaves that are growing from the old roots. I studied the plants I have propagated, amazed at how beautiful the roots look growing in water. I sat in my chairs, releasing all of my weight into them… thinking about how many bodies these chairs have held. It feels safe in my home because the changes that happen here are gentle and beautiful.
In a world where we are constantly grieving, relationships become central tenets to keep me grounded. It is in the memories I have of my friend who passed, and the comfort I get from my friends who are still on this plane… that makes it bearable. Many indigenous cultures of North America believe that all life on this planet (human and non-human) is a series of relationships. This is why many Indigenous communities did not believe in private property. You cannot own / possess something you are in a reciprocal relationship with. This includes land, air, plants, the sea, and each other. In the interview with adé aforementioned, they said: “material culture is a really compelling intervention for where we can have generative responses [to climate change]. Material culture being relationships between us and our things.” How would we consume and produce differently if we felt like every choice is in relationship with something and someone else?
The reason I feel so held in my homespace is because I am in relationship with everything I have in this space. All of the material things have a story, an origin, a thought process associated with them. Several of the things in my homespace I made or changed, my friends made, or was given to me by family and friends. I love to propagate clippings of my older plants in water because it allows me to witness the process of growth. By allowing a plant clipping to live in the gentle environment of water I get to see its roots grow and tangle in the most gorgeous way. I get to be part of the relationship of change between the plant and the water it is growing in / with.
Since I was a child I would move around the furniture and change things in my bedroom—to the best of my ability. Sometimes my dad would hear me shuffling things around in my room, pop his head in the door and say: “are you crazy,” in a way that he does when he’s teasing me. I was not crazy, just an 11-year old changing her bedroom around to create a space to feel held and inspired in. I didn’t know why I loved moving things around and organizing stuff when I was a child and teenager. When I got my first apartment as an adult, I realized it allows me to experience change as safety and creativity. My relationship to my space is about creativity and there is freedom in that. I still move around my furniture on a regular basis.
When I was 19 one of my best friends from high school, Akeya, suddenly died of a brain aneurysm. To honor her I printed out a letter she wrote to me and taped it to my dorm room wall. In this letter she wrote: “Freedom exists in passion.” Later on in life, I got that tattooed on that back of my neck because it felt like a fact of life. I am passionate about rethinking our relationships to our environment, our materials, our stuff, and each other. This passion has yielded creativity, and an endless search to create freedom for myself and others—in the midst of immense and subtle change(s).
The ocean will reclaim much of the land. Nation states will lose landmass, and more of us will lose our homes… the places and people we know. Cities will start to blur into a game of monopoly. Archives / plaques / old maps of the Blackness that was once here will replace actual communities. In the midst of this, those of us that have the privilege of living inside homespaces can center relationships as a salve to the consistent grief of living in a changing world. We can re- think / imagine / make / build our spaces to hold us in a way that the external environments will not. There are so many ways to do this. How we consume / create / design our stuff is one of many opportunities to value all forms of a life. I pray that we have the foresight to propagate the relationships that make us whole, held, and collectively survive.
