I’ve been holding a lot of anger lately. Anger at Israel’s continued attack on Palestinians, anger the US’s complicity. Anger at the suggestion that this war is anything but a land grab and genocide. Anger at a world indifferent to suffering. I’ve even felt anger at myself for allowing the naive hope back in January that a ceasefire was near.

I’ve held anger, also, at the feeling hate is taking hold in my heart. In a time where I would love to lose myself in the act of creating, I’m finding more than half my mind taken up with violent arguments against invisible enemies and I wonder more and more if this anger is going to bleed into other parts of my life. I’ve been stalling on making some art for this reason. I’ve had my usual procrastination habits surface, this is nothing new, but among them is a feeling that I’m not presently equal to the task. This is a project I want to fill with love. I’ve been having a hard time connecting to that.

I was sitting with all these thoughts by the water on a stunningly beautiful day yesterday. I had made time to process these feelings (specifically, one hour and twenty minutes… the time I had until my ferry home boarded) and wasn’t really getting anywhere until a pigeon landed on a railing in front of me. My immediate reaction was to smile and say “Oh, hello, beautiful.”

I share this not to impress upon you what a kind and kooky person I am (omg, he talks to pigeons!) but as an acknowledgement that anger and beauty can exist side by side. I’m not quite sure how to express it, except that I’m not any less mad… but I’m not only mad. In that moment where the pigeon landed and looked at me, I felt a connection to this rapacious thing (it was, in fact, after a bite of the sweet potato pie I was holding) and in whatever confluence of colors, sounds, smells and energies that flitted between us in that moment, I felt joy.

Earlier in the day I came two across two short pieces on grief. Both said, essentially, that Western habits of carrying on and getting back to business as usual are in direct conflict to processing loss. The thought resonated with me and I do feel that I’m stumbling around grief. I don’t know that I’m mourning a loss of innocence—I can’t remember a time in my life, even as a really young kid, when I wasn’t acutely aware of injustice—but I do feel like I’m mourning a world that should know better. And, ultimately, if I’m angry at anything, it’s at a group of people in power who refuse to admit that they are massacring a population of indigenous people for some highly coveted land. I’m angry that this is, actually, business as usual and angry that the people in power are happy to pretend it’s not.

Surprisingly, I realize I can live with this anger. It’s specific, it’s justified, and it’s finite. It can hang with me and the pigeon and the sweet potato pie on that bench by the bay until such a time that it’s (oh blessed day) irrelevant. At which time I’ll release it. Happily.

It’s going to be a delicate thing, working on the project I mentioned (the one I hope to fill with love), but such is life.

Playing now: PEACE PIECE, Bill Evans

I came into February on fire. Motivated. Jazzed, even. I had just bought two new books by some of my favorite authors and had hopes of reviewing them on February 1st to start off a month-long celebration of Black creators and, specifically, the books on my shelf (new and old) that I enjoy sharing. What a month it was to be!

Cut to the 29th. Leap Year gave me a full extra day to meet this goal but even so I was barely able to take advantage of it. At two thirty in the afternoon I begun drafting this post and even hit a premature “publish” (to secure the February date). However, WordPress runs on GMT and seeing as it was after midnight in London, this post is marked as being written in March. That annoyed me more than you’ll ever know and took more than some of the wind out of my sails.

Late as I am, though, I still want to write an appreciation of these two books. Let’s start with THE LAST STAND. An advanced review of THE LAST STAND by Colby Sharp (watch it here) gave the book some incredibly high praise and, yeah, Sharp didn’t miss. Eady tells a story that plays like one of those Americana movies (I’m thinking of films about farms and farmers like FIELD OF DREAMS or THE STRAIGHT STORY or even Pixar’s THE GOOD DINOSAUR). Like the best of those, THE LAST STAND is simultaneously small and epic.

Not everything that is important is big and glossy. Sometimes the important things are rusty wheelbarrows and bruised plums.

So if I’m going to compare THE LAST STAND to film, then maybe it’s more like a documentary. The story based on the history (past and living) of Black owned farms in Garnett, South Carolina. This brings me to the art. The Pumphrey brothers’ work reminded me immediately of the quilts of Gee’s Bend which I know, primarily, from a set of stamps I bought in 2006 and which I enjoyed too much as art to ever use.

Thinking about Gee’s Bend (located in the central part of Alabama) got me looking up Black folk artists of the South and I found some paintings and prints by William H. Johnson (1901-1970) who is from Florence, South Carolina a mere three hours from Garnett. Check it out.

I don’t know enough of the Pumphrey’s work to know if either Gee’s Bend or William H. Johnson are influences but it was fun to look at and think about this beautiful art.

Speaking of beautiful art…

MY BLOCK LOOKS LIKE is an absolute masterpiece. I’ve spoken before about my love of oil pastels in illustration and I did a Twitter thing about the influences of hip hop in C. G. Esperanza’s work in SOUL FOOD SUNDAY (Winsome Bingham and C. G. Esperanza) so I don’t want to repeat myself too much.

I will say this, though: the movement and life in Morrison’s illustrations makes me think of dance. Like Esperanza, Morrison has spoken about creating art through “the lens of hip-hop culture”, but I think MY BLOCK LOOKS LIKE transcends one musical genre. There are some spreads where I hear jazz, there are some where I hear classical.

There’s salsa on the bodega page, maybe afro-cuban beats on the Icee pan spread. I think what this comes down to is that Morrison’s work in BLOCK captures dance in all its forms. Hip-hop does come across strongest, though, and rooting it firmly there is Janelle Harper’s text. It reads like slam poetry. It’s celebratory and empowering. I love it.

Last thing I’ll say is these books hold up to closer study. I feel like both have a story hidden within the main text (in THE LAST STAND it’s a story told by the colors Eady uses to punctuate scene transitions until a moment when he doesn’t, in MY BLOCK LOOKS LIKE ME that story is hidden in the main character’s hair which changes to mimic and even interact with the cityscape). I used to co-host a book club with author Ebony Lynn Mudd where we would dig into things like this (dissecting SOUL FOOD SUNDAY, mentioned above, was the first book to get this treatment, in fact). I have a feeling we could spend a few hours on this topic alone, much less the entire rest of the book including all the Black history that went over my head. More stuff that I can talk about in a month, actually. Even with the extra day.

Content warning: death

I can’t stop thinking about the photo of the drowned toddler, the Syrian child who lost his life crossing the Mediterranean and who came to rest with his cheek against the sand, his head pointing towards the gently lapping waves. I saw the photo in 2015 at the outset of the European refugee crisis and I don’t think it’s ever far from my thoughts. A few weeks ago I was compelled to draw what I could remember of the image, but I stopped myself before I got too far.

As sad and terrible as I found the picture, what was more distressing to me was that the world didn’t stop when it was published. We didn’t drop everything and fix the world. The photo came out, people saw it, business went on as usual. When I think of this, I lose hope.

In the last three months I’ve seen more images of dead and injured children than I care to count. Some, like the image of the father pressing sweets into his dead child’s hand feel poised to haunt me for the next ten years. There was another photo, though, it was of donuts. The donuts were made in a makeshift bakery in the rubble of a destroyed bakery, in the center of a flattened neighborhood. The donuts were brightly glazed and looked beautiful and delicious. The photo cheered me, briefly, then broke my heart.

Selfishly I thought, “There’s no number of donuts I can draw that would make the world feel better.” I know it’s not my burden, except that it is. There’s a scene at the climax of EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE ALL AT ONCE where Waymond has a breakdown. The world is falling apart around him and he doesn’t know why but he can’t help but feel it is all his fault. I felt that scene in the deepest part of me.

I admire Elise Gravel. She has spoken clearly and consistently about Palestine. Shelley Couvillion made a beautiful comic about a Palestinian child passing into the afterlife and meeting her mother. I’ve read beautiful poetry by Palestian authors living under occupation. I don’t feel I can add anything to their expressions of grief and hope. Or maybe I’m afraid to.

I almost drew a picture of Alan Kurdi, the drowned toddler, back in December but I put my pencil down. I think I was supposed to draw it, but I didn’t. The drawing I didn’t make has hung in the periphery of my thoughts since then. But now it’s creating eddies. Swirling images I don’t know what to do with. Israel’s attacks on Palestine continue and now, suddenly, the US is bombing Yemen. Things have gotten a lot worse very quickly. But if I’m honest, I do feel hope that a ceasefire is coming.

I drew the picture last night. I’m glad I did. It’s not a GUERNICA but it never had to be. I might revisit it, I might recycle it. It doesn’t belong on a pedestal, but all the same, it is valid. As are my feelings of despair. Denying and avoiding them is no way to go through the world, painful as it is. And I think acknowledging them, oddly enough, made space for my imagination to believe the world can be fixed.

Playing now: STORM, Godspeed You Black Emperor

Update: I kept this page open while I tried to decide if I could face a difficult subject. I finally did, twenty days later, here.

My undershirt is splattered with paint. My face is tinted with satisfaction.