(No. 54) Mirrors & Windows
words from a woman with heart in one hand, and pen in the other
“Within each of us there is some piece of humanness that knows we are not being served by the machine which orchestrates crisis after crisis and is grinding all our futures into dust.”
- Audre Lorde
Writers Note (post script):
Writing, art, and creation is always a continuation. There is nothing new under the sun except the history we don’t know. This is a rendition of a quote attributed to Harry S. Truman, but I grew up hearing my Mother say it. Mirrors and Windows is language I also know and I’m not sure at what point I began using the language again, that we are mirrors to see to and windows to see through but it is a bit kismet that I met these words again while editing this piece. The title changed in the editing process but as thing always go, everything as meant.
Born in Los Angeles but raised in Lake Elsinore, Riverside, California, I had many windows but very few mirrors. The windows allowed me to see and experience what it was like to live in environments that lacked Love and did not welcome difference. For a long time I refused to own, write or talk about growing up in Lake Elsinore because of how painful it was. Growing up there had a profound impact on who I am within myself, and within in the world. When I started journaling in 1999, it was an effort to create my own mirror. I continue to journal for the same reason. I write and share my work both as a mirror for reflection and window for insight and perspective. I’m not doing or speaking to anything new. This work is simply, and significantly, a continuation…
I speak to this in what you will read below, but want to reiterate, this piece is unfinished. It’s a starting point of thought, an internal tipping. There is no grand summation, no what’s next, no advice on what to do now (though you can decide what’s next and what to do now on your own). There is thought, there are questions, and there is space for contemplation and reflection.
Now without further ado…
Collection of Thoughts
This piece is a collection of thoughts. A peak behind the curtain, a revealing of how I think all peaces begin, pieces that, once delivered, out and into the world are full of color and life, breath and newness, clarity and eloquence. This piece is unfinished, and yet still whole, grown, and yet still growing. This peace is a weaving of present and past. As someone who writes and does language, I reflect, conceive and imagine new worlds through the mediums of words and language1. This is most often a process of excavation, bringing back up and forth the past, through memory and literature, in effort to make the present more clear. I recognize the past as an illuminating factor, allowing for present envisioning and future reimagining.
As I move these words from a place where the heart and mind meet, and thought forms and flows out from pen to page and then page gets transcribed into digital form, I am listening to the voices of Lucille Clifton and Sonia Sanchez vibrate out from the television. On the television screen Sanchez and Clifton sit next to each other on stage, alongside Moderator Elsa Davis, at The New School in New York. The month is October. The year is 2001. The conversation is titled, ‘Mirrors and Windows’.2
“I borrowed something from Rudine Sims who said that all children, and I think all adults as well, need mirrors and widows. Mirrors in which they can see themselves, windows through which they can see the world. And everybody’s children are disadvantaged by not having that. There are some children in our culture who have only seen mirrors, they are disadvantaged. There are some children in our culture who have only seen windows, they are disadvantaged. And so it’s one of the things I like to think to do is to provide balance, to provide windows and mirrors if possible.”
- Lucille Clifton
Window: The Televised Apocalypse
The windows through which I see show me that I have, in my perception, confused what the apocalypse means. The apocalypse I have seen in the movies are not in fact depictions of the world ending, they are depictions of the world if america and other colonialist powers are to continue to exist as we always have. These depictions where the entire planet is scorched, dry, dusty and barren, with only one or two, or small clusters of very few humans, and animals, that have survived in each corner of the world, are misleading. These depictions of a world, or an america, where there is no power, no telephones, though there is always miraculously some ancient device that one of the few humans stumbles upon, which allows them to reach another human, are too flat. These depictions where there is no food, or whatever food there is, is boxed or canned, and somehow not rotten or expired, offer us up a future ending that is filled with too much grace. These depictions where the weather is either searing and sweltering hot or numbingly cold, are too easily imagined. In essence the film makers want us to believe that the apocalypse, the end of the world as we know it, is a future in which civilization is all but dead, and gone. Eviscerated. But the truth of it, the reality that we will experience if we are to continue on as we always have under governments rooted in white supremacy, capitalism and patriarchy, is a reality that will give the appearance of this present life, but there will be no living in it, at least not freely, not wholly, or joyfully. It will be the present hollowed out with the most horrific elements of the past returning in fashions more brutal, more gruesome and more deadly.
Mirror: The Future Meeting Past
On the outside, things will appear as “normal”. This “normal” we are presently and so vehemently fighting to return brings me to the question, what is so desirable about the normalcy of a country built atop the blood and bodies of Indigenous people? What is so seductive about the normalcy of a country built by enslaved Africans and Indigenous Peoples, human beings who were not even considered as such until 1868, that’s just 158 years ago, and before then were only counted as three fifths of a human because to count them as such gave slave holding states more political power. What is so attractive about the norms created by this country? Is the attractiveness just that the norms are familiar? Do we know that familiarity can masquerade as comfort and comfort can be deadly?
In this future where everything is normal, normal will mean basic. Food will be bland. “Entertainment” will be censored and sanitized, television, books, movies, music and art will be one continuous body of propaganda and lies. Neighborhoods will resemble prison complexes. In the areas that have individual houses, each house will be painted some shade of white, off white, or light, almost white, grey. Our bodies will be perpetually unwell, a result of our immune systems having been subjected to decades and centuries of vaccines that were in actuality poison, poison administered to “preserve our health” which is to say administered to preserve our dependence on a system that needs us ill and unable to think, make choices, make noise, form thoughts independent of what the regime wants us to believe. And we will be governed by a regime in this future of normalcy. Democracy will be a thing of the past, as will freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, and freedom to petition. Those “living” in this future won’t actually know what freedom is and there will be no books to tell of a time when freedom was, because they will have all been banned and burned.
Is any of this sounding familiar?
One last bit. Because we are so unwell, and because we are not free to assemble, there will be little to no close interactions, no intimacy, the language of love and community may still exist in words but they will have lost all meaning because those surviving in this future won’t know what it is to be cared for, or held, or loved. What those in this future will know is how to be “productive”, “high performing”, “assets” in order to limit negative “liability” and guarantee “lucrative” “performance”. The performance of course never being lucrative for those performing. The populationPopulation in this future will be controlled. To bear children will not be a choice but an obligation, an obligation only for some and forbidden for others. Force and coercion will not be exceptions, but be the rule. Warrants, rights, and due process will be a thing of the past. There will be no such thing as “process of justice” because there will be no process and there will be no “justice”. And, speaking again of normalcy, it will be normal to see bodies lying dead in the street, or hanging from trees, and not just Black, Brown and Indigenous bodies, but any body.
Is any of this sounding familiar?
The depictions of the apocalypse we have seen are misleading because if it is to depict the world as it would be if we continued on as we are, it would be a depiction of the past repeating itself. Only it will be more heinous, more evil and more sadistic. In this future there will be life but living will be a thing the majority won’t be able to remember. For the few who do, they will be haunted by the question, “How did we get here?”
Is any of this sounding familiar?
I feel it necessary to paint a picture that is closer to a reality than most of us would like to admit because being reluctant in our admittance isn’t going to change its possibility. If we read, if we listen, if we converse in community both with those whose experiences we can identify with and those whose experiences are vastly different from ours, we will gain more sight, veils will lift and, if we are willing, we will more openly accept that america’s “great”ness, and this “normal” we have been seeking is not worth pursuing or repeating.
Question?
At this juncture, and if you are still with me, thank you, I want to pull this question from the past and ask it not for you to answer to me but for you to reflect within and amongst yourselves in effort to assess where you have been and where you are in your thoughts and consciousness.
“What are you going to do today to resist domination?”
- bell hooks
This question, I recognize, only bears significance if you believe there is domination to resist, and you find your resistance to be not only vital and necessary but obligatory.
“When one day our children’s children ask, “What did you do?” When they rise like the Guatemalan poet Rene Castillo rose and asked us what we did “when our nations dried out slowly like a sweet fire small and alone.” When they ask us, “What did you do when the poor suffered, when tenderness and life burnt out of them?” We, the lovers of selves, the lovers of people, the lovers of justice will turn and say, “We resisted. We resisted the ego. We resisted the gossip, the rumor in ourselves. We resisted the great, the people red orialist in a selves. We resisted the quick killings and quick retaliations of others. We resisted war, we resisted war, we resisted war. Can you do it? Can you resist? Can you say it? Can you resist? Can you remember? Can you resist? Resist, resist, resist.
Black voters in Florida, can you resist? Can you remember 41 bullets? Can you say 41 bullets? Can you remember, cccccccccccccccan you resssssist, even in this death, can you resist?????????????”
- Sonia Sanchez from a letter to writer Chinua Achebe
Resistance
Writing has been a form of resistance I have used since before I knew what resistance was. Before I understood that I had been born into resistance because Idowu Adewale is my Nigerian Father and Judy Leonard is my Indigenous American Mother, a musician and poet, and poet and writer, deeply concerned with justice, deeply rooted in the awareness of the worlds around them, free thinkers, and two people who loved each other, a love which birthed me. Me, a woman breaking into herself, a woman writing and doing language, learning how to perfect her loving, self-love, familial love, platonic love, romantic love, communal love, environmental love, spiritual love, revolutionary love. Me, a woman discovering the “razors between her teeth”3 and learning how to use them, not to cut any person but to cut through delusion so that the truth cannot be buried in it. Me, a woman learning how to balance the windows and mirrors, heart in one hand and pen the other. Me, a woman learning that I am not the heroine, the savior, the martyr or the medicine. I am peace4 and part of the weapon.
In 1975 Maya Angelou sat down with James Baldwin, for a “Conversation With A Native Son”.5 Towards the end of the interview, Angelou asks, “Is there any time in life where you start a project that you’re not afraid?” Baldwin begins reflecting on the completion of “No Name In The Street” and a conversation with his brother, David who Baldwin says pointed out to him that to be a writer, which essentially is to keep trying, meant that he, “had to keep the faith.”
Imagining
I am imagining a future that is beyond comprehension because it looks nothing like anything I have ever seen, experienced or known, at least not in this present body or lifetime, but I believe, and have faith in its possibility. In the future we exist differently. In the future we flourish, frolic and thrive. Not just some of us, but all of us. In the future there is an eternal and infinite, acknowledged and bound tethering between “we” and “I”, in the same way there is an eternal and infinite tethering between Mother and Nature, this Earth and all of its inhabitants. In this future people truly know, experience and practice Love. Not just Love of themselves and their things, because again the tethering, but Love for everything and everyone that creates the world the future dwells within.
In the future, history is not hidden and to know and speak of it honestly is not forbidden. In the future the truth rests in plain sight, is taught proudly because in the future this country, whether it is still known as america or goes by another name, knows itself and owns its knowing. History, in this future, will include all the happenings that led to its rebirth and evolution where in we the people chose not to make another america, and not to make america great again, because we the people know, america is not great and never has been.
“Each of us are a revolution.
When your body has been controlled, your mind has been altered, your soul has been suppressed, where does revolution begin? It begins when you regain control of your body, realign the mind, and reawaken the soul. I say, “re” because there was a time before. Though those who have wielded their power of deception have done so for centuries, our Earth is older than their doom and wiser than their duplicity. You are of the Earth. Therefore, you are too. Each of us are a revolution when we decide to redefine what has been defined for our kind.”
- Ethically Rude by: Amanda Seales , Full Moon Musings: The Revolution of You
Gratitude
If you took the journey and read this piece in its entirety, I want to express my gratitude. With so much presently pushing and pulling at the limits of our time and attention, I do not take either for granted.
If you are willing to dedicate just a little more time, and have not already, I encourage you to click through on the clickable links. Each one of these conversations I have watched and played back as I wrote, edited, re-wrote, edited and edited again. This piece was written with Lorde, Sanchez, Clifton and Baldwin (and Morrison, not quoted here but always present) speaking over me.
I am forever grateful for the windows, mirrors, and luminaries, past, and present who continue to compel and invite me to write into the deep.
In gratitude,
Ẹniafẹ Isis
Words: singular units and/or components of communication. Language: A body of words and the systems for their use (The definitions here are exhaustive and are provided for context, should it be needed. Source: the dictionary)
Lucille Clifton & Sonia Sanchez: Mirrors & Windows. Video Source: YouTube, Cave Canem Foundation
Reference Quote: “Someone asked me, ‘Why do you write?’ and I said because I wanted to tell people how I became this woman with razor blades between her teeth.” - Sonia Sanchez
Peace as it is used here refers to the definition according to Buddhism wherein peace is defined not as the absence of conflict, or ward, but as a profound state of inner tranquility, contentment and mental harmony. This harmony is present when the mind is freed from greed, hatred and delusion. In Buddhism, peace is considered a holistic concept, encompassing both individual mental stability and amicable relationships with the world.
“Conversation With A Native Son” Maya Angelou and James Baldwin. Source: YouTube: Incarcerated Nation Network INC Media
I am so deeply moved by this. Thank you so much for sharing without restraint. I have a lot to reflect on and revisit here.
"Writing has been a form of resistance I have used since before I knew what resistance was." This resonated deeply. Thank you for reminding us of the power and responsibility we carry.