Being online during a pandemic in the climate of black death is absolutely triggering. To let the pain out, I’ve had to tap out—had to let those who love me pull me out of this trigger. We, as Black women, carry the heaviness of anti-black/misogynoir policing and anti-black violence with COVID. As Brand contends, ‘we’ve been living in a pandemic all of our [black] life; it is structural rather than viral; it is the global state of emergency of antiblackness’. #SayHerName, #ICantBreathe, #Blacklivesmatter, sigh, I’m so tired. I don’t want to live this pattern time and time again. I want to harness this anger/energy to build alternative possibilities for Black life, but I’m.just.so.drained. So now, with this weight on my spirit, I am required to uphold my scholarly duties in addition to tutoring and mentoring the future of tomorrow, guest lecturing, hosting anti-black workshops, all whilst navigating an anti-black world that is determined to script my ancestors, descendants and I out of this narrative of life. It’s a lot. But I’m managing.
- Beatrice Anane-Bediakoh, Chief-Deputy-Editor
This year, I have felt simultaneously stuck in stillness but also surrounded by chaos. I feel frozen in time, trapped by the same mundane four walls that I call home, unable to think beyond their ontological restrictions. I feel time speeding past me as I stumble, fumble, and watch helplessly as it slips through my outreached fingers. My stuckness has forced me to rely on technology to marginally satiate my visual and auditory senses. So, I, the cyborg, use my new digital eyes and ears to escape these walls and find myself in chaos. I watch stewing in my impotent anger, but not shock, as the structures that make up our society continue to function as intended and wreak coordinated havoc on the world, committing gratuitous violence on people of colour, but especially Black people, around the world. I’m tired, and my weariness builds as I attempt to support my community, family, and friends in any way I can. My mind becomes more chaotic by the day as the ‘need’ for productivity builds and sits immiscibly with my awareness that productivity makes me implicated and complicit in reproducing this shitty system. But I the half-person, half-machine, must keep on keepin on, so I suppress and compartmentalize my emotions to continue producing during my ‘free’ time and stand idly by and watch as the academy squeezes every last drop of value from my body, too tired to think of an otherwise.
- Giovanni Carranza- Hernandez, Chief-Deputy-Editor
My head feels like a bottomless container of all the things I have to get done. Grade midterms, conduct interviews, read, email, coordinate mutual aid project, do mutual aid – cook, deliver, repeat, speak on panels, email, coordinate this journal, manage our social media, manage social media for mutual aid project, email, edit articles, submit articles, revise articles, find articles, try to have a life…I’m always doing something, and yet, the list never gets smaller. I’m productive. Always productive. Friends say: “I don’t know how you do it.” It bothers me. People mean well when they say it, but it’s intended to celebrate my seemingly endless ability to output, to keep up, and the thing is, I’m not keeping up with anything. I feel like my body is disintegrating on a cellular level. I’m not even tried, I’m just exhausted. I don’t want to sleep, I want to rest, to sit, to breath, to stop. That’s what endless, uncompromised productivity really looks like. You don’t actually keep up; something has to give. Nobody keeps up with academia and feels OK about it, especially not us. Something always gives, or breaks. I think I’m breaking, or something.
- Jade Crimson Rose Da Costa, Founder/Editor-in-Chief