You've got to dig to dig it, you dig?
“A life lived under a dome, in an artificially generated atmosphere, is still a life” (or a still life)
“I’ve been thinking a great deal about time and motion lately […] about being a still point in the ceaseless rush.” (ESJM)
“the time of evening when the women sit around telling stories with one eye on the sky, looking out for that strange white bird that perches on the tallest trees and watches them with a look that seems to want to tell them something.” (FM)
may heaven be filled
with literate men
may they bed you
with respect.
here rests by Lucille Clifton
“un homme d’abres, un homme de fleurs” (mirrors the surreal “hummingbird-women, tropical flower-women” in Suzanne Césaire, The Great Camouflage)
Césaire explains, “I’m not going to entomb myself in some strait particularism. But I don’t intend either to become lost in a fleshless universalism…. I have a different idea of a universal. It is of a universal rich with all that is particular, rich with all the particulars there are, the deepening of each particular, the coexistence of them all.”
Negritude was bigger even than Africa, that we were part of an international moment which held the promise of universal emancipation, that our destiny coincided with the universal freedom of workers and colonized people worldwide—all this gave us a bigger and more important identity than the ones previously available to us through kinship, ethnicity, and race–Manthia Diawara
Robin Kelley, Freedom Dreams
Gala Speech composed by Daniel Pemberton. Amsterdam, 2022.
Wifredo Lam … sought to represent “the Negro spirit, the beauty of the plastic art of the blacks. In this way I could act as a Trojan horse that would spew forth hallucinating figures with the power to surprise, to disturb the dreams of the exploiters. I knew I was running the risk of not being understood either by the man in the street or by the others. But a true picture has the power to set the imagination to work, even if it takes time.”
Fanon–“I belonged to a race that had already been working in gold and silver two thousand years ago.”
Discourse was less concerned with the specifics of political economy than with a way of thinking. … It is poetry and therefore revolt. (RK)
“Gestures intimating an everyday, conjured up, and transfigured place.”
“a mode of embodied abstraction that frees his spirit”
“The presence of the sublime tells us that to break the world and open access to the universal sense, we have to shatter how we know.” (LB)
“If we opened people up, we’d find landscapes. If we opened me up, we’d find beaches.”? Agnès Varda.
“… as fresh as I remember. I close my eyes to savor it” (RD) ??