the art of creative dissent 🎶
so, here we are. again.
“Every woman has a well-stocked arsenal of anger potentially useful against those oppressions, personal and institutional, which brought that anger into being. Focused with precision, it can become a powerful source of energy serving progress and change…” Audre Lorde
America is swearing in a fascist (again) on MLK Day next year. Sitting with my breath and trying to soak up spiritual and artistic ancestral wisdom feels insufficient, but it’s necessary. Remembering your breath—even angry, lion breaths!—is necessary. I’m not surprised this time, though. I’m disappointed, but I’m a Black woman living in America. I am angry, but I am not surprised.
“To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious, is to be in a rage almost all the time. So the first problem is how to control that rage so that it won’t destroy you.” James Baldwin
I was a full-time social justice advocate and sometime-y writer and musician eight years ago, new to Washington, D.C. Today, as a full-time artist and consultant, my creativity is supposed to respond to, live, and thrive in this container. And, weirdly, enough, I’m ready. I am unhinged and I am ready.
“Instead, I got mad, and anger when it's used to act, when used nonviolently, has power.” Sandra Cisneros
I don’t know what the next few days, weeks, months, or four years will look like. My feelings are mixed with worry, despair, and frustration. I will say that I spent a lot of time this year long before the election polls opened sitting with and crafting through so much anger due to personal relationship shifts. And I’m grateful, not for the situation that caused it, but for how it has already informed how I grieve differently and creatively.
I curated a fiery playlist and added new thoughts to my updated soul-care creative writing journal. All summer, the fire I was sitting with began showing up creatively through new stories: a children’s book about sitting with uncomfortable emotions (including) anger, a musical about delving into the shadows and power that heals generations, short films and stories about misunderstood women in mythology and folklore like Mami Wata and Lilith. When I say my pen and creative musings have been unhinged, they are unhinged.
So, while there’s rage and deep fear, I’m ready for what comes because I have an outlet. If you’re reading this and identify as a creative activist: a writer, musician, dancer, visual artist, or multidisciplinary storyteller, you have an outlet. You get to be as ragey as you want with your craft. You get to be as lovey as you want with your craft. You get to take every ounce of emotion that your sensitive soul (I see you, I am you) feels and create. You don’t have to share it with anyone, but you have an outlet to stay with your breath and stay in your body.
Your art is your protest, beloved. Your art is necessary. Your art is prophetic, innovative, comforting, unsettling, life-changing, and (even through anger) is what will encourage others to have an ounce of hope for the future. Create something today and stay in your body.
Breathing & Writing Practice:
Think about the creative activists that have come before you. These could be well-known public figures or folks from your family who gathered everyone around the family piano. Think about each creative who has inspired you and the worlds they lived through and endured.
As you think through folks, say their names aloud or in your mind.
Miriam Makeba
Phillis Wheatley
Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges
Florence Price
Hazel Scott
Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti
Nella Larsen & Zora Neale Hurston (the entire Harlem Renaissance Literati!)
Maya Angelou
Nina Simone
Solange Knowles
Lurlee Anna Dean Campbell
Breathe into their strength and their creative energy. If you want, write down your list and come back to it as often as you need to. Add to it as more people come to mind, as often as you need to. These people created, publicly and privately, despite. Their creative audacity is alive and well in you.
For Justice & Joy,
LySaundra Janeé