010

After the Roots Have Been Exhumed

We will tell our stories differently.

We look at each other and determine the level of love first and not the capacity for terror. 

I have been personally confronted with this shift in reality as I settle into this faceted Uprootedness.

Its prismatic death/life cycle, as above so below perspective and a desperate need for a cataclysmic silencing of all American Allegiance to Whiteness— because it is so brutish, perverse and dense.

The annals of Whiteness are seeped into every living and dead American. 

Therefore, we all exhibit some form of the brutish, perverse and the dense.

The trap music beats are a slow slung grave song we all register with because its sampled stems are offshoots from the roots/raices we share. 

Co-production. 

Equality. 

Reform.

Docile words.

I fight to make sense in this space so cluttered with rage and terror, even if I am at home in chaos.

If I am fighting at home, I am definitely fighting in the streets. This does not produce leisure or rest.

I am at constant war, you see. With myself and with the world around me. 

To show up, raise my voice, soften my thoughts, protect us, love you.

And I need to rest. I am a mother. 

So I find rest, in the soils of our distance. The flowers of our togetherness. The tilling and cultivating of various species, specimens in the dish of life.

Remove the weeds, talk gentle to the buds.

I do this to protect my life force.

I listen to the advice of those around me. My parents, my elders, my friends, the curated-algorithm that is our collective empathy on Instagram… and I realize that none of these people understand what the end of the world looks like. All the advices that come to my ears feel antiquated. This is the same sentient ear, eye, sense combo that has always placed my thoughts and actions around the corner of the collective.

This is how I make my art. 

This is how I reach you.

So that in the swell, maybe you wont drown, and we can share a boat.

-Alfalfa Brown