Another black person has been shot and killed. I wonder how many times I will write those words in my life. I have written these at least dozens of times over the past years. I have seen the videos, said their names out loud, been chased by police, coughed on tear gas, and have worried over it; white supremacy being the it; for so, so long.
During my last year of college, my writing and my placement to it began to change. Michael Brown had been killed and suddenly I was so awakened to the ways that I could be brutalized and ignored. I started to see all the white faces in those books and what they ignored. I started to read more black radical literature and connect to my history. My mother started jokingly calling me, “Father Africa.”
But my writing slowed. I struggled to connect to it. While working a hotel job in Montana, I started writing blogs. It felt aimless and suddenly, the writer that I had told myself I was; wasn’t the same as the writer that I needed to become in an anti-black world.
I realized that I’d had so many experiences tied to my blackness that I’d neglected to put into my own work. What was that first rally like in Cleveland on the street where Anthony Sowell killed all those black women? Why was the heat in Jamaica different? Why were black men so conditioned to measure other people’s capacity for them in dominance? What had I been encouraged to bury about myself?
These are questions that drove me towards wanting to unpack the political world of blackness in my writing. These questions weren’t just creative questions, they were political and life and organizing-related questions. These questions led me to France, to Standing Rock, to questioning my double consciousness in the Philippines, and lead me to some of the writing I’ve done since moving to Columbus, OH.
“Writing for the movement” is a strange phrase in some ways. The movement is not an object to be written for. Instead, I think it means that we take the time to be moved by the world, to be enraged by the world, and to write it as radically as possible.
“I am about life. I’m gonna live as hard as i can and as full as i can until i die. And i’m not letting these parasites, these oppressors, these greedy racist swine make me kill my children in my mind, before they are even born.” - Assata Shakur
TIPS ON HOW TO WRITE FOR THE MOVEMENT
Be a participant and organizer, not solely a spectator. James Baldwin spoke a lot on “bearing witness”. I challenge people to hone in on Baldwin’s notion and take it even further. In order to bear witness, we must be invested and participating in what we are witnessing.
Start by honing in on topics or movements that you care deeply about, then expand from there. This is important to do because when we realize the scope of capitalism, racism, colonialism, etc, we can try to attack as many problems as possible with our work. Although this is possible, it may be better to start small and expand our creative praxis to include other issues, topics, and movements, especially ones that we are less knowledgeable about.
Delve into different mediums. As an artist, it may help to think of your “movement writing” more generally as “movement art”.
Let’s take a trip and look at some of the most respected cultural and movement writers…
ESSEX HEMPHILL (1957-1995) broke new ground with his poetry and community organizing work. A staple in the Philadephia writing scene, Hemphill is most known for his poetry compilations like In The Life, which was the first to feature only gay, black men.
ELAINE BROWN (1945 to present) was a notable Black Panther Party member that worked to help set up the BPP’s first Free Breakfast Program and would go on to be the Chairman of Defense from 1974 to 1977. She was an avid movement poet and singer, leading to Seize The Time and Until We Are All Free. She went on to write A Taste of Power, one of the most respected memoirs from the Black Power era.
DIANE DI PRIMA was born in 1934 and recently passed on October 25, 2020. With a grandfather who was an anarchist, Prima was raised in a family steeped with ideals on liberation. By the 1950’s, she was a regular writer among the Beatniks and edited The Floating Bear. She notably wrote Revolutionary Letters, a staple of hope and resistance among many activists, leftists, and organizers.