-Lynthia Edwards, “My Blues Just Ain’t Fa Nobody to be Sangin.”
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processing:
One of the projects I’m working on calls on the direct influence of Black women makers & their creations. I remember reading Dolores Kendrick’s The Women of Plums in undergrad & wondering about the space between Kendrick and the speakers—the women whose voices would bridge us & a larger ache. It was critical for me to think there—in the gap between. & I have often felt thrusted into that gap & done my work when necessary. Mother. Sister. Etc. There is a way with language that I can move with—toward an emotional truth. There is a necessary negative I can attempt to transmute and make something new—to tune words to a rhythm that serves & honors the women on the other side of those gaps.
Despite both trauma & the oppressive state, I am not tragically myself. I don’t find it hard to hold me, my folks, my way of approaching the page. I know the story & I plan to honor it. Maybe this is why I can condemn the devastation in Palestine, in Congo, on my block, etc. with clarity. But I am limited to my tools. I am limited to my voice & my actual being in a world where, let’s be honest, I am not always met with care, respect, or generosity—even by those folks would expect it from. & sometimes, honoring the smallness, the limits, feels like working toward an emotional truth as well.
& my project on Black women makers allows me to celebrate what my experience has taught me while being curious about what others have made: how they’ve helped me see myself & my world with clarity. & before placing both my reality & my possibility alongside that of another, I’ve had to be real about my own makings. My goals.
I want us to be free. I wanna be able to say what’s true. I want us to have what’s ours. I know that we don’t always have each other, depending on who we are or where & when. I want us to mind the gap productively—to be honest in a way that might reveal our hearts & the hearts of our hellish empires.
20-something me wrote: I wanna know how the fruit flies know to come.
Now? I know that they arrive before they huddle and hover, before they multiply. That gap is closed.
What did they think would happen to her in there? Her mind?
I wondered then, as my sister was released from jail yet again, without the resources to sustain her, without support. Now, I mind the gap between the unknown and knowing—toward a truth. The question can cover some distance. I can make something and sit it beside the absurd fact. I can reveal a blues. I am limited, at times, to language. I can do something with it though. Here’s to that. & more soon.
<3