Since 2014 this longstanding podcast favourite has been creating hard-hitting cinematic stories about love, bodies and all of the things between humans that we don’t know how to name. Creator Kaitlin Prest works with her friends, idols and all kinds of loved ones to bring you into an expansive sonic universe that challenges what we think we know about relationships.
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1 Shuai Wang’s Journey from China to Charleston 38:30
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Chef Shuai Wang was the runner-up on the 22nd season of Bravo’s Top Chef and is the force behind two standout restaurants in Charleston, South Carolina—Jackrabbit Filly and King BBQ—where he brings together the flavors of his childhood in Beijing and the spirit of the South in some pretty unforgettable ways. He grew up just a short walk from Tiananmen Square, in a tiny home with no electricity or running water, where his grandmother often cooked over charcoal. Later, in Queens, New York, his mom taught herself to cook—her first dishes were a little salty, but they were always made with love. And somewhere along the way, Shuai learned that cooking wasn’t just about food—it was about taking care of people. After years working in New York kitchens, he made his way to Charleston and started building something that feels entirely his own. Today, we’re talking about how all those experiences come together on the plate, the family stories behind his cooking, and what it’s been like to share that journey on national TV. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices…
Notes on the Moment [02.02.2025]
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Content provided by Ismatu Gwendolyn. All podcast content including episodes, graphics, and podcast descriptions are uploaded and provided directly by Ismatu Gwendolyn or their podcast platform partner. If you believe someone is using your copyrighted work without your permission, you can follow the process outlined here https://ppacc.player.fm/legal.
Midnight musings on Bird Flu, Yahtzee, and the merits of taking a jumping break with your resident one year old. Pour some tea for this one.
All essays (transcripts) available at threadings.io
63 episodes
Manage episode 464818394 series 3554324
Content provided by Ismatu Gwendolyn. All podcast content including episodes, graphics, and podcast descriptions are uploaded and provided directly by Ismatu Gwendolyn or their podcast platform partner. If you believe someone is using your copyrighted work without your permission, you can follow the process outlined here https://ppacc.player.fm/legal.
Midnight musings on Bird Flu, Yahtzee, and the merits of taking a jumping break with your resident one year old. Pour some tea for this one.
All essays (transcripts) available at threadings.io
63 episodes
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1 The Financial Transparency Meeting but Instead of Showing Graphs I Yell 29:48
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In which ismatu Gwendolyn, budding revolutionary, reminds everyone (once again) that their goal is NOT a life where they are individually comfortable! Sign up to support them financially at threadings.io: https://www.threadings.io/the-financial-transparency-meeting-but-i-yell-instead-of-show-graphs/#/portal/signup Fill out the resource form in case you have non-momentary skills or supplies you believe to be relevant to their projects. https://www.jotform.com/form/251693630800151 Cool. Please stop asking me to focus on my own individual finances. Do you know how good I am at making individual money. What an unnecessarily small life— especially when ACTUAL FOOD SOVEREIGNTY IS ON THE TABLE. Come on now!…

1 yes, I really do mean “algorithmically-elected official.” 43:51
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Full transcript, as always, available at threadings.io

1 when am I compelled to speak? (ft. Madleen flotilla, Booker, and necessary reorientation) 30:59
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full transcript at threadings.io

1 THE WAR IS NOT A METAPHOR: The Capitalist, the Defector, the Traitor, and the Revolutionaries 1:06:02
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The global working class engages in active revolution as we speak (and here I am to pontificate about it). As I (ismatu, artist, the pen behind these essays) become more powerful in my world-making, where do I go? Will I defect out of the working class and join the rank of capitalists? Or will I stake my personal powers for collective gain?…

1 Targeted Deportations and the Changing Face of Fascism 22:34
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In which writer and child of immigrants ismatu gwendolyn discusses the systematic deportations of academic immigrants. Beyond debating whether fascism has “taken hold” in the United States… what do you do when you are afraid for yourself? What happens now that plain-clothed “officers” hunt in broad daylight? All transcripts and sources available at threadings.io https://www.threadings.io/they-hunt-in-broad-daylight-2/…
In which Ismatu Gwendolyn, young revolutionary with a pen in hand, seeks to stake their power with and for The People, rather than utilizing the trust of their masses as a site of endless extraction. Link to essay: Link to video: https://youtu.be/jaEMTluGj5E Show Notes: Twenty Enemies by James Forman twenty enemies james forman.pdf you've been traumatized into hating reading (and it's making you easier to oppress): Information Anarchy: The Case Against Sponsorships…
Midnight musings on Bird Flu, Yahtzee, and the merits of taking a jumping break with your resident one year old. Pour some tea for this one. All essays (transcripts) available at threadings.io
Otherwise entitled, “Everybody wanna be Nina Simone; don’t nobody wanna sing Mississippi Goddam. ” In which ismatu gwendolyn, writer and public scholar, unpacks our collective desire for artists that reflect the times (and holds up a persistent and unforgiving mirror). The full transcript can be viewed at threadings.io.…
The purpose of the State of the Constituency is to reorient ourselves to who I am (the invisible pen behind all these essays, Ismatu Gwendolyn) what I do, why I do what I do, and how you all affect me . You are also invited to explore what you want from your participation in this ether community. I’m also sitting here with blueberry chamomile lemon tea. God, that's so good. With a little honey. Read the full transcript, and all other essays, at threadings.io https://www.threadings.io/state-of-the-constituency-2024/…
in which ismatu gwendolyn returns to their stage to talk about what’s keeping them up at night. Transcription available at threadings.io https://www.threadings.io/on-fear/

1 There are a great many springtimes: notes on Bethann Hardison’s Invisible Beauty 17:00
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The strangest part about terminal illness is how often death comes for a peck on the lips and nothing more. A few weeks ago, I flew home to attend my mother's final affairs. Now we sit, smoothies and champagne glasses, watching a movie to spend time together. It's sunny this Tuesday. Here are reflections from Invisible Beauty on Bethann Hardison, from both me and my mother. Jazz of the Episode: Stepping Through The Shadow x Menahan Street Band Tryin’ Times x Roberta Flack Estate x Leilo Luttazzi Slow and Easy x Speedy West Rainy Day Lady x Menahan Street Band Love And Peace x Quincy Jones Read the full essay at ismatu.substack.com This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit ismatu.substack.com/subscribe…

1 Harris, Palestine, and the Spectacle of Liberation. 43:16
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a series of musings nearly entitled, “ I am frightened by the way people tire of the world. ” I have had a negative amount of desire to write but Toni Morrison said it’s your job to write when evil wishes to distract you so. Here I am, I suppose. The thesis of today’s musings are that we want the fiction of a happy ending more than we want actual liberation. Looking for a transcript, sources and links? Read the full work at ismatu.substack.com. Selected Jazz of the Episode: Muziqa heywete x Getatchew Mekurya Afternoon of a Swan x Speedy West HOW CAN WE MEND A BROKEN HEART x Kahil El’Zabar Love and Peace x Quincy Jones A Taste of Honey x Andy Bey, The Bey Sisters Better Than x Lake Street Drive Soul Serenade x Aretha Franklin La notte muore (orchestra) x Sandro Brugnolini Sweet Leilani x Les Paul & His Trio This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit ismatu.substack.com/subscribe…
Questions for your consideration: how do I appreciate you well for taking part in this space? And, how best can we a public good? Please whatever comment features you have available and let me know! ft. Afternoon of a Swan by Speedy West This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit ismatu.substack.com/subscribe…

1 Girl go to SLEEP! ft. lessons from night life, grad school, and strangers 1:00:52
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Sleep tips for those who struggle to sleep when they could. Essay (and transcript) available at ismatu.substack.com. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit ismatu.substack.com/subscribe
A letter written for Bisan, circulated to my constituency: Peace. I write to you from the floor of my bedroom in Sierra Leone. Two days ago, Iran launched successful counter-attacks against the apartheid regime occupying the land of Palestine, currently known as Israel (which bombed their embassy in an open act of war on April 1). I can hear construction workers breaking rocks outside my window and the children of the house playing and running and the noise of Freetown traffic in an endless rise and fall. I always find it pertinent to name the moment clearly, as I am always certain tomorrow will not look like today; the things I consider commonplace will be precious and long gone. Some of my mind firmly plants itself in yesterday already: gone are the days where I can see children running and playing in the street— in any street, anywhere in the world— and I do not think of Palestinian children massacred in front of each other. I am in a permanent after. I kneel to pray and recall accounts of young Sudanese women messaging their local religious leaders, asking if they will still be permitted into paradise if they commit suicide to avoid rape from occupying soldiers. I am in a permanent after. Today is April 15, 2024. Tomorrow will not look like today. Bisan Owda, a filmmaker, journalist and storyteller, has called the world to strike on several occasions for the liberation of her homeland, Palestine. I feel about Bisan (and Hind, and Motaz, and many others) like I feel about my cousins: I pray for them before bed, asking for their continued protection, wondering for them— the same way I prayed for my family as a child, during Sierra Leone’s own neocolonial war of attrition, or when Ebola came like the angel of death. This is the way I pray for Bisan, and for Palestine: with this heart beating in me that is both theirs and mine. She is my age. Bisan! You are my age! I wish we could have met at university, or at an artists workshop; I feel we would have long conversation. I understand more now about what my auntie dequi means when she says sister in the struggle— that’s how she speaks of indigenous womyn, about Palestinian womyn, about womyn across the colonized world that use every tool they have to resist. Sisters in the struggle. It’s never felt like an understatement— I just feel it in my body now. Sisters (n.): someone who you most ardently for. Someone who you care for such that it compels you to action. I’m certain many of you feel this for me—this long distance, cross-cultural, transcontinental kinship. Rhita, a stranger turned friend via instagram DMs, had me over for tea on a long layover in Morocco, and we spent at least two hours talking about blooming revolution and healing through art (she’s a musician and she helps pave the way for musicians in Morocco, who fight for their royalties as well as their right to exist. Brilliant). Sisters in struggle: your lens on the world changes mine, and I am grateful for it. Today we are among war; I mobilize and I organize and I pray for a day where we might sit down for tea. I write to Bisan with the attention of my own constituency to shine light on her calls for a general strike, one of which occurs today, April 15 2024. These urgent asks have been met with lots of skepticism across the Western world : how do we organize something this fast? Does it really matter if I participate? How will one strike solve anything? I write to throw my pen and my circumstance behind you, Bisan. I lend you all (my constituency) my lenses as a teacher, in hopes that I make plain to you why these questions of feasibility assume there is another way out of our current standing oppressions. We have no other option for worldwide liberation that does not include a mass refusal to produce capital. We occupy a crucial moment of pivot as a species. Victory for the masses feels impossible from the complete waste they lay on anyone who dissents to their power. This feeling is manufactured. The hopelessness is manufactured. We see the insecurity of the nation-state everywhere. Never before has surveillance from the state been so totalitarian— even (especially) through the device likely read this on. I also submit: a conglomeration of ruling bodies who monitor their citizens with paranoia do so because they are very aware of their own precarity. ^this is a very good video if you want to learn more about that claim. The nation-state, as it currently exists, knows it will fall. Never before have we had this much access to one another in organizing across the world for our good. They know, and we are beginning to find out, this iteration of the human sovereign world (capitalism ruled by white, Western supremacy) is dying. Something else is on the way. The question is what? Will the world that comes after this one be for us or against us? I hope this set of arguments helps us understand our place in the human narrative, as those that still have the power to stop the machine. Theses: (1) The genocide in Palestine is not unique nor novel except in the fact that we can see it in real time. This is what colonial war has always looked like. Ruthie Wilson Gilmore described the machine perfectly. “Racism , specifically, is the state-sanctioned or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death ." ― Ruth Wilson Gilmore , Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California Ruthie Wilson Gilmore is an abolitionist that has radicalized me immensely. To put the above in my terms: racism occurs or made when a group of people (Black, Indigenous, and colonized peoples) are constantly exposed to premature death (in overt ways, such as carpet bombing or slavery, or in more covert ways, like pollution, policy that denies healthcare, poverty wages, restricting access to food). This mass killing comes either with a green light from the state, or comes from the civilian populace of that oppressive nation-state. Capitalism in and of itself created the need for racial oppression. The establishment of capitalism required the open and expedited slaughter of indigenous peoples to secure their own land, and the slow-bred, constant slaughter of African peoples as a vehicle to over-harvest lands across North and South America, as well as across Europe. And they continue to expand. So then: racial capitalism is a death-machine. There is no way we can transition this world to a new order, where the masses are sovereign over our own lives, without withholding the labor that keeps the death machine going. Striking is not just in a decline of consumption, which is when we refuse to consume the products made by the machine. Radical action occurs when we decline production . That’s the only way to stop the machine in their tracks. If we do not, the machine will continue slaughter for output. Simply put: you can’t just stop buying. We do actually have to stop working. Nothing about the actions taking place in the Palestinian genocide are new! This is racial capitalism doing what it has always done: slaughtered the indigenous population and embedded heinous acts of violence to crush dissent, exacted a nation-state on the shallow graves, and found or imported a labor force to exploit such that they can strip the land of her resources. It has always been this horrifying. The only difference now is that we can see the horror live televised, in real time. (2) we are tasked with mobilization from our new understandings. We have a sister war now occurring in Sudan, where the superpower benefitting from violent civilian death is the United Arab Emirates (who extract the gold from Sudan in deals with the warring military groups while the people are slaughtered). This is a war of attrition, designed to break the will of the people bit by bit, massacre by massacre until they force consent to military rule. We had wars of similar depravity in the killings of Iraqis in this made up War on Terror by the United States, in the killings of Black radical counter-insurgents in the United States’ second civil war in the 1960s, in the attempted decimation of Viet Nam (again, by the US, there might be a pattern ). This is what I mean about wars of colonialism— this is what the annexing of Hawaii looked like. The fall of Burkina-Faso’s revolutionary government. This is just to name a few. It’s happened again and again, and it will keep happening until we pivot away from allowing the technology of the nation-state be sovereign over the earth. This is what the nation-state does under racial capitalism. (2a) EXTRAPOLATE. The 15th of April 2024 also marks one year of war in Sudan, which has largely been ignored by Western spectacle. I say all the time your attention is lucrative. This particular bit is addressed to my constituency: never is this more clear than watching world trials, UN emergency meetings, world mobilization on behalf of Palestine and no such thing for Sudan. I know that Palestinians do not feel good about this. We should not have to be in a state where we have to compete for attention in order to get justice. We should not require spectacle to mobilize for our countrymen! There are no journalist influencers living in Sudan to have risen out as superstars with moment to moment updates— the technological infrastructure and the political landscape simply didn’t align for that. Is this why we don’t care? I am also hyper aware, as a Black American and as a Sierra Leonean, of how no one blinks when Black people die. We were the original capital under racial capitalism. There still is this sentiment, especially among the Western world, that suffering and dying is just… what we do. We humans are very good at caring for what we can manage to see. I am both heartened and excited by seeing increased conversations, direct actions, fundraisers, for Palestine. The responsibility to the human family is to constantly be in the work of expanding your eyesight— which means that you too care for the people that you might not see every day in your algorithm. The human tapestry, woven together in different colors and patterns, is ultimately one long, interconnected thread. The first step of mobilization that must come from from realizing our situation under racial capitalism is fighting for everyone that suffers from it— not just the people we can see. If we fight situationally, we are set up to lose, because we save one part of the human tapestry while another part burns. Coordinated action can only come from coordinated understanding. No one is free until everyone is free. (3) Fast. Train. Study. Fight. Only in a slaveocracy would the idea of freedom fighting and resistance seem mad. —Mumia Abu-Jamal, 2003 | Black August Commentary on Prison Radio Fast; train; study; fight is the slogan of Black August, a month of discipline where those active in the fight for liberation remember our political prisoners and dedicate ourserlves to the sharpening of our minds, bodies, and communities in service of liberation. Black August was first commemorated with collective action in 1971 when George Jackson was assassinated by San Quentin prison guards in an attempt to quell the revolutionary spirit he stewarded within the concentration camp of prison enslavement. The article linked above is by Mama Ayaana Mashama, an educator, healer, poet, and founding member of the Oakland Chapter of the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement from the Bay. Black August also acknowledges the amount of life and world-changing victories of resistance that have occurred for Black oppressed peoples in August— everything from the Haitian Revolution to Nat Turner’s Rebellion to the birth of Fred Hampton. I find these four actions to be the key to mobilization in the practical rather than just the rhetorical or theoretical, especially if you are newly radicalized (like me. I’ve only been radicalized for six years). What are the practical ways to strike? Fasting from consumption: Do not engage in mindless consumption. Do not buy anything from companies who use your dollars to oppress yourself and your neighbor— this includes groceries, gas, flights, fast food, more than that. Do not grease the machine with your dollars. I understand these things are embedded into our day to day society. Resist anyways. Additionally, fasting during the inaugural Black August included abstinence from radio and television. Last year, my first time fasting for Black August, I fasted from screens. Conscious divestment from the machine includes mind and body , not just dollars . Training (in mind and body): Train your attention. Train yourself to notice when you impulse spend. Money is a token you can trade for power. To be in the role of consumer is to constantly trade your chance for power for a momentary comfort— a good feeling, a rush, a high, a status symbol, all of which depreciate for you and all of which give tokens of power to the world-makers currently in charge. Now is the time to build up the muscles of dissent (both the literal and the metaphysical strength and will to act in favor of the people when it is time to). Study: You are only as useful to the movement as you are able to use yourself well. Study yourself and your own wants needs and habits. Know intimately your own boundaries, motivations and desires. What is your version of freedom? What are you specifically fighting for? Write it down! Study your own observable world. Ensure that you are caught up well on the events that surround you. This means local. When you walk around outside, what do you see? First: do you take walks? I would recommend them. Who are your neighbors? What do they do? What do they want? Who are your comrades and who are not? What is going in your local policy? Study the world that you cannot personally observe (and not just the news that comes through your algorithm). Learn where the stitches of the human tapestry are frayed. Note where they are being or have been burned intentionally. How do you connect to those charred places? What does regeneration and recreation look like? The backdrop of Sudan’s war saw about eight months of sporadic striking that finally led to the general strike, which then led to the successful popular uprising. Sudan had a successful popular uprising in 2019 because they engaged in strikes, strikes, strikes until they created enough mass action to win. It will never feel like the right time. We create the time we need to mobilize on our best behalf. Fight: Fight the impulse to do nothing. You are in a natural state of doing nothing—by design. So better, I should say: you are kept in a default state of believing that you should do nothing. Do not do nothing. The more you do something, the easier it is to do the next thing. Fight the will to accept the world as something that happens above you. You have more power than you think you do. Fight the urge to act alone. Fight the urge to shrink from consequence. Fight the restrictions that inevitably follow dissent. Also literally engaging in combat training is helpful (for legal purposes I don’t condone violence :P). (4) Revolution more about beginnings than endings. Critical mass happens with repeat action. The tide will not change because of some mass quantum leap everyone has in logic and circumstance. It will not come because your neighbor saw you pick up your pitchfork and thought, “oh yes, we need schedule Revolution today, let me grab my chainsaw.” The masses will shift because person after person after person continued to practice small, increasing modes of dissent. Dissent!— such that when powder kegs go off, when moments occur like this, or like Black Lives Matter worldwide uprisings of 2020, moments which break through the numb dissonance we all wade through every day , we have enough discipline to engage in organized action. General striking needs to be not just for Palestine, but for a ll the pressing problems that have a time mark on them. If Palestine is what gets you to mobilize, I commend you. Because Palestine is what got me to mobilize for general strikes. It was because of my sister Bisan, who called for them. And I thank her. Thank you! We as a human species need to recognize that what’s happening in Palestine will happen again if we do not have a coalesced list of needs and demands. We need to understand the need to shape policy. We strike for sovereignty under the hands of the masses. Sovereignty under the hands of the masses! I learn so much from studying the successes and failures of the Burkina Faso revolution, lasting for four glorious years. Here’s what’s previously happened across colonized countries that managed to have revolutions, like clockwork. Step three (mobilization) was executed by a critical mass of people (not everyone, not even the majority, but enough people fasted, trained, studied, fought, enough people taught their neighbor/girlfriend/cousin/librarian/grocery store clerk the same thing, of the ways we can engage with struggle rather than the ways we run from it, or assume it’s the job of someone else. There was enough mobilization sustained by extrapolation (the understanding that this was bigger than them) such that a popular uprising occurred, when which is a hard thing not to lose (as in, to let dissipate). A popular uprising is a difficult thing to lose! The strength in numbers is very, very real. Look at the farmer’s strike in India! How could they fail? Then, this new and fragile union with a new world, this baby that needs attention, protecting, a family of support around it— gets hijacked. Colonial or neocolonial regimes take root and begin killing as many people as they can in attempts to spread epigenetic fear into the populace such that they never, ever try and imagine a world without their power ever again. This is what’s currently happening in Sudan right now. This is what is happening in Palestine. This is what’s happening everywhere where there are colonized people fighting against oppressive regimes. If we can manage to act together, if we can manage world-wide mobilization and world-wide solidarity, we can stand for one another at this crucial stage— we must dream past the start of something and be thinking towards the day when we are inevitably successful— how will we keep those gains? Past the fall of the empire— what are we fighting for? How do we intend to keep it? Peace to you and yours, Bisan. The sun has set in Sierra Leone. There is not a day that goes by where I do not think about you. And I thank for being plugged in, being supportive of, being for the revolutions across the world— especially your own. Thank you for being someone who belongs to your country in ways that are bold and ways that endanger you. I am so proud of you. I can’t thank you enough. And peace to everyone reading, here meaning: I hope the work you engage with today emboldens you to act tomorrow. ismatu g. PS. THIS IS STILL A STRIKE THAT LIVES LARGELY ON SOCIAL MEDIA! WE NEED THAT TO CHANGE. TALK! TO! YOUR! NEIGHBORS ! YOUR PARENTS ! PEOPLE YOU KNOW IN PHYSICAL, DAILY LIFE ! I DID NOT LEARN ABOUT THIS UNTIL PEOPLE IN MY PHYSICAL LIFE TOLD ME! USE THIS TEXT AND TALK ABOUT IT thank you have a good day. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit ismatu.substack.com/subscribe…
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Threadings.

1 first draft thoughts: on revolutionary love and existing outside of myself 23:05
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[The Preview]: Oh, then in regards to mutual aid, I keep faltering with this series because I can't, like… I think I need to find a balance between what I wanna talk about and what I feel like the public needs. Because I keep curriculum planning and then realizing we are way behind as a public where I thought we were when it comes to understanding the importance of mutual aid and what it does. I really wanted to jump into the how-to, which is the mutual aid by Dean Spade is just a book of how-to. And then I realized we were missing a lot of the why. We are doing all of this work and being in community with one another because we are designed to be compelled by community, not because we are trying to win a battle. Yeah, like the winning the battle stuff is important. That's cute and that's... It's not insignificant. It's just that if our goal is to win, my question is win what ? Win against tyranny, win against oppression, win against all these things. Do we see how that still centers the oppressor in the first place? We're not actually thinking about like, what is it that you want to win? Past beating them. You want, you know, OK, I understand we want the satisfaction of victory. What is victory? What does it actually look like to win? What does the world look like? What do people's day to day look like? What does it look like for the most vulnerable in our societies when we win? Because then we have to start thinking about building. That's a, it harkens a bit to what I said earlier about when I ask my groups, okay, so like what does community look like? What do you want community to look like? And I get a lot of, “well, I don't want this. I don't want to feel this. I don't want that.” You haven't actually told me what it is that you wanna build. You've told me what it is that you wanna avoid. And that is, it can be helpful, but you don't lay a foundation with negative space. We lay a foundation packed solid on what it is that we do want. ismatu gwendolyn (00:01.134) Hello, oh no, I don't have my notes near me. Now I've started this, I gotta get up. I want a little tea. You know what, just give me a second. Let me situate myself. [ismatu putters around the apartment] : Notes. Tea mug. [ismatu, muttering mostly to themself] : Beyoncé do be right about some things. It does feel good to be alive. I will not hold you. ismatu gwendolyn (00:55.121) Welcome a little bit of Pistachio Tea, in which I'm cheating on the love of my life and drinking white coconut. Mmm. Oh, that's delicious. Ohhhhhh, that's so good. Thank you, God. Alrighty. So. I am here because I am time blind, and sometimes I think I'm doing great and then I wake up and I realize I have not posted in a month. Again. Oops! There are so many moving parts to my life and I'm beginning to figure out a cadence that works well, and the cadence is Ismatu, you have to put down your perfectionism. It's past like, do what you say that you'll do. It's past, people want to hear from you anyways. It gets into more of you cannot always be curated all the time. You cannot always put out your magnum opus. You cannot always write THEE essay or pen THE script or whatnot. And I know that this doesn't need to be the goal because every now and again I get [distinct feline noises of tomfoolery] that's my cat lemon deciding that she also needs to make herself known. Every now and again I get a, “I appreciated this essay so much!” from an essay that metrically did not perform that well. I can base my entire, like, not quite my life. I wouldn't say that I'm that sold, but whether I think something is good or did good or what have you based on how many eyes were on it and how many people saw it and how many comments I got. And that can be... not even can be. It's quite a rollercoaster because every time I put something out, I'm like waiting, bated breath. Do people like it? Do people fuck with it? Do people think it's cool? Am I lame? Am I gross? I don't know. So every now and again, I get an email that talks about an essay that I thought that nobody saw because, I don't know, Substack told me nobody saw it. So I was just like, okay, well, I guess that's not it. I think I keep looking. It's like, um... Being a content creator is a lot like trying to pan and strike gold. Like you don't really know what's gonna pop off and resonate with people until it happens. So, I think that I'm in a space where I have to put down my perceptions of what other people think is good and what other people think is correct or beautiful. And I just have to go with what I… want. What I want, as it continues, is a life that resonates with me. And what I want is the freedom to be able to put my first draft out there somewhere, at least the first draft that makes it to me wanting to share my thoughts without having to worry about whether it is the various kinds of Good Enough that I erect for myself. So last weekend, over this past weekend, I wanted to write an essay about love and the attention economy and how those things upset one another. I've been talking a lot in the groups that I run about community. What makes community, what makes it good, what we're scared of. Often when I ask people, so what do we think when we want community? When I say, what do you need from a community to be able to be expansive, to not shrink? We often start naming what we don't want because oftentimes our experiences in community are far more traumatizing than they have been helpful. So I've been thinking about this essay. I keep wanting to pull it forth before it's ready. One of the reasons that I think I need to start talking more and sharing more first drafts or maybe first drafts with you all [the patrons and substackers] and then second drafts when I have a little bit more teeth on the subject before it turns into an essay is because writing these essays is like giving birth. I just straight up can't rush it. I am bringing something into the world that is bigger than me and my timelines and what I want. So, I’m trying to figure out a way to be able to let people in on this process of thinking without having it be so formed. There have to be some places for my scrambled egg thoughts, you know? I'm thinking about this essay about exceptionalism? about the attention economy, about what love looks like in community, how these things interrelate with one another. What I'm finding is being in online spaces, talking about sincere community work, that people assume that I am some sort of exception. They assume that what they perceive as charisma or friendliness is just some like innate ability that God struck me with rather than many, many years of trying and failing and trying and failing at friendship. I've said before, or rather I think I said in a video that's rendering right now to upload, that I bring a lot of thoughts from my journals when I was like 15 and 16. I'm finding that where we are as a general public is was talking about in my journals when I was a teenager, when I was 15 and 16. I was thinking and ruminating a whole lot about love and the lack thereof. And I was deeply lonely. I didn't want to be lonely. I was hoping that there would be a day where I had space to breathe , to be around people that liked me when I expand and when I shrink, space to not be around so many pedestals. Just space. Space to take if I wanted it, space to give if I wanted to give, space to be in sincere community with other people that didn't expect me to be any type of way and that could love me no matter what hue I was that day. You know? I was thinking a lot. I'm thinking about this 15 year old self now, who was deeply lonely, who had a lot of trouble with friendship, who continued to be rejected, who had friends that lasted in the moment that didn't happen in adulthood, who had to start over in college, who was scared over and over, who had to start over again and again in college settings, in graduate school settings, in professional settings. Who made myself skilled at the wants of friendship because I spent many years lonely thinking and dreaming of what it could be like to want this thing that I thought was impossible. I'm sitting here now on the other side of really beautiful friendship that I talk about a lot on the internet. And I'm finding that people think that I am the exception. I'm finding that people find me exceptional. “Well, Ismatu, it must be easy for you because, *insert thing here.*” I don't know what I have done— or I do know what I have done. I've trained myself to be good on camera. I've trained myself to be charismatic. I've trained myself to say hi to strangers. I did all this work to make myself super, super friendly so that I wouldn't have to deal with all this aching loneliness that I felt for most of my life. And now people see exceptionalism. Well, it must be easy for you when it was not easy. When I know, especially as an autistic person, right, that all of these traits can be learned. I'm also thinking about brilliance and how often we're sold the idea that brilliance is again like a lightning strike from God Almighty and not something that you hone. That brilliance is the presence of intellect that can't be taught or some sort of aptitude for knowledge that can't possibly be taught, rather than the continual returning to oneself even after the systems that we have in place try to divorce you from your own internal community. There are these two things: the friendliness, the charisma, the ability to be well explained, and this perception of brilliance or intelligence that is making me seem exceptional , like other people cannot possibly do what it is that I do. And I don't know how to push back against that without sounding like I'm Cinderella outgrowing her glass slippers. You know? Especially because one of the reasons I talk about Beauty is because it gives me a lot of structural privilege in terms of navigating social circles. And one of the reasons I talk about Beauty is because it is not easy to be an autistic, introverted person in the body of somebody Beautiful. Because when you are capital B Beautiful, people also expect you to be a certain level of poised, or confident, or charismatic. They don't expect you to be awkward and painfully shy. And I wasn't actually shy, I was just um... crass, I'll say? lol. I didn't have strong understandings of what you should and should not say. I ended up being rude a lot, and I didn't mean to be rude. I just, I don't know, didn't understand the normal waxes and wanes of conversation. I didn't understand that most conversation does not actually want you to be honest about your honest opinion. I didn't understand that even when you must be given and able to provide an opinion, it has to be soft and bubble wrapped, because that's not how I wanted other people to interact with me. I didn't understand how to make an object of my body and how to not wear exactly what I was thinking on my face and on my person. It was very off-putting. The reason I learned to walk in an area of poise and grace and benevolence is because people continued to make it known that was the expectation of me. I'm realizing that in an effort to make myself some sort of palatable, I've also dehumanized myself a little bit to the experience of being painfully awkward and terrified of doing and saying the wrong thing. Then in addition! right? that's essay one, that's like, ruminating at me and I can't tell if these two essays are interrelated or not. I have one more that's just been chewing on me and it's this idea of— oh no, and it's an entirely different notebook. It's this idea of revolutionary love. I'm reading through In Pursuit of Revolutionary Love by Joy James. and it has a chapter called Oshun's Flight. I think I might just read Oshun's Flight and talk about it and release it tonight because I'm sick of not creating. I'm sick of being in this silo where I have to do and say everything perfectly and write the most beautiful essay in the world in order to feel like I can take space on my podcast. That's absurd! But Oshun's Flight is about... It's the preface to the rest of the text, Revolutionary Love, which revolutionary love is a concept that Joy James expands on past the captive maternal. What does it look like to be engaged with a love that might cost you your life? What does it look like to be so compelled by love for oneself and one's community that you are willing to go past inconvenience, to go past what is easily accessible? and move towards what might cost you something quite significant? What does that feel like? How does that unfold? And how can our communities possibly survive without it? So… hold on, let me put myself on a cute DND so I don't keep pinging. Because that's my bestie. Once I get one of those, I'm like, oop. Uh, let me just... Ahhhhh. I also feel like a weenie (!!!!) because I keep saying, I want to talk about masturbation online and then I keep like, pussying out!! because I know that it's going to be taken in like a sensationalist manner because anytime a particularly a woman folk, a queer person talks about sex, it's taken in this sensationalist manner. But I continue to say that my target audience is me when I was 15. I want to be making the stuff that I wish that I was looking at and reading and writing when I was 15. and I had all these questions about the world that the adults around me either couldn't answer or I didn't feel like they were being honest. I didn't know what masturbation was when I was 15. I grew up in a house where nobody talked about it. Um, I- I go on a little bit about this in the Get Unready With Me video that is literally rendering right now if it's not already done. It's a whole series that I keep thinking of that came to me during this year's Ramadan because I realized how depressed I was when I was hungry. I realized that food is not only a mood regulator for me, it's literally masturbatory, the way that I go about food and eating food, the way that I engage with making things that are delicious or eating things that are delicious. it literally is an orgasmic experience. I think the way that I go about multiple aspects and areas of life are orgasmic. I think this is A, because of my relationship to food, I grew up food insecure, so it kind of makes sense that I like heavily pleasure seek in food and how that doesn't have to be a bad thing. And B, I also had a really delayed sexual debut because of the heaviness of Christianity that I grew up in. I would say that I'm on the later side of average because I started having... I had gone through the gambit of what most people consider sex when I was like 22. I had checked off what boxes people might naturally conceive of. There was plenty that I hadn't done, but yeah. So, and that was like, it was also very interesting becoming a stripper before I started having sex in general. It's just like, I wanna talk about sex in public. I understand that I'm gonna have to put it behind a paywall for a multitude of reasons, but I also keep feeling myself like shy away from these subjects because, ah, respectability, because I'm pussy? I don't know. Because I keep thinking that maybe I'm doing too much? …Says who? Ismatu, you right. Says who? Oh, then in regards to mutual aid, I keep faltering with this series because I can't, like I think I need to find a balance between what I wanna talk about and what I feel like the public needs because I keep curriculum planning and then realizing we are way behind as a public where I thought we were when it comes to understanding the importance of mutual aid and what it does. I really wanted to jump into the how-to, which is the mutual aid by Dean Spade is just a book of how-to. And then I realized we were missing a lot of the why. We are doing all of this work and being in community with one another because we are designed to be compelled by community, not because we are trying to win a battle. Yeah, like the winning the battle stuff is important. That's cute and that's... It's not insignificant. It's just that if our goal is to win, my question is win what ? Win against tyranny, win against oppression, win against all these things. Do we see how that still centers the oppressor in the first place? We're not actually thinking about like, what is it that you want to win? Past beating them. You want, you know, OK, I understand we want the satisfaction of victory. What is victory? What does it actually look like to win? What does the world look like? What do people's day to day look like? What does it look like for the most vulnerable in our societies when we win? Because then we have to start thinking about building. That's a, it harkens a bit to what I said earlier about when I ask my groups, okay, so like what does community look like? What do you want community to look like? And I get a lot of, “well, I don't want this. I don't want to feel this. I don't want that.” You haven't actually told me what it is that you wanna build. You've told me what it is that you wanna avoid. And that is, it can be helpful, but you don't lay a foundation with negative space. We lay a foundation packed solid on what it is that we do want. I think contemporary widespread political education online lashes like heat in a frying pan. It's all about like what do we do and not why do we do it? Because you can have the what and like the what is very it's viral bait. People really do (and me included, I'm including myself and people), we love to feel productive. We love cosplaying productivity without necessarily doing something attached to the things that we're learning. So the how-to's, the tutorials, the book lists, they help us to feel really productive, but they don’t necessarily translate to actionable items that take place in your real life. So I'm slowing down. I'm talking a lot more about like, okay, so what does it mean to make friends? What does that look like? And that's way slower than I thought that I was going. And I owe people videos. Like I have attached to the how-to stuff. I have videos attached to this. I wanted to highlight Juju Bae's podcast, a little Juju, because they're doing a fundraiser and that's been going on for months and I've been wanting to make this stuff like for literal months. it’s like, a six month video that's overdue, but I wanna put it in a context that it will thrive in, which means I gotta get through the why before I get to the how. I wanted to highlight the University of Michigan because their grad students are on strike and it's like a strike girl summer. Hey, everybody's striking. You get a strike, I get a strike, he, she, me, we get a strike, we love it. I'm feeling like these things should have been done forever ago, but I'm also feeling like I don't know that they would have the traction that I want without this basis of why do we do this? Why am I highlighting these people in particular? Because I'm in direct community with them, you know? [a medium strength negro sigh] I'm overwhelmed. And at many points in time in this journey of existing in a real time. I feel like I'm in over my head because I don't have answers. I'm learning in real time, not because I'm learning this material for the first time. I'm learning about how people interact with this material and I'm changing course as I go. That's overwhelming and I feel like I'm doing everything wrong and I feel like I should be moving a lot faster than I'm capable of. [a moment of consideration] In all, today I feel like a weenie. So we will try again tomorrow. ah. [a therapist tries at self-regulation] I'm doing my best, and my best is all I can do. I'm preparing for this big push surrounding Revolutionary Healers and a third university as possible in August. So I kind of have a deadline to be able to get some of this stuff done. So I'm gonna get it done. A lot of this feels insurmountable, but many things feel insurmountable until they're done. I don't actually think this is about proving to myself that I can do it. I think this is about proving to myself that I am exactly who I think that I am… and not even me , right? I'm continually blown away by how big I am. I recently had a sound engineer say that they've been dreaming of an opportunity like this because I'm bringing them on to a couple different projects and I was like, wow, me ? The subject of dreams ? the material of answered prayers? Me? [ismatu unto themself]: Yes, bitch, you. I feel so itty bitty. I feel like a beetle. I feel like a worm. And then I'm sitting on a patio with a new friend having dinner and I hear my name. I'm like, what? I look up and someone is waving at me. So excited to see me— in the way that like, you wave at a friend when you're in the fifth grade and you unexpectedly see a friend from school at the grocery store and you're like, hiiiiiiii, Emily!!! She's going, “Ismatu!!! hello!!” I was like, hi!! She was like, “I watch all your videos online, I love them!” I was like, oh, thank you! I can't feel myself outside of me, but it appears as though everyone else can. [a moment of consideration] I am so alarmed//I am so grateful. It lets me know that I must endeavor to keep trying and past trying. Trying and then consistency and then from consistency into blooming. And I think it's actually the blooming that scares me because I have so little control over buds and blossoms. That would mean that I just have to let myself unfold in public where people can see me. I am beginning to realize that that's not altogether a bad thing. Thank you for listening. I always let my tea get cold, so I actually started with a cold tea this time. I'ma catch you in the next one. ismatu g. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit ismatu.substack.com/subscribe…
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1 a former stripper, current workaholic finds balance. 30:07
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No stripping did not ruin my relationship with men but you should hear how many hours in a row I can work nonstop hahahahah <3 on treating myself as a body that breathes and moves slowly. Much love. Jazz of the Episode [incomplete list]: Hour of Parting x Sun Ra Send In The Clowns x Pat Martino Lena’s Song x The Sweet Enoughs Cicada Season x Fuubutsushi Why, Buzzardman, Why? X Alabaster Plume Spring Yaounde x Wynton Marsalis The Jordan River Song x Emahoy Tsege Mariam Gebru Turpentine x Alabaster Plume Tenkou Why Feel Sorry x Emahoy Tsege Mariam Gebru This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit ismatu.substack.com/subscribe…
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1 Therapists Are Also the Police: Social Work, Sex Work, and the Politics of Deservingness 36:33
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Therapists are part of the Soft Police (signed, an MSW). Read the full essay at Ismatu.Substack.com. Thank you for listening with an open mind! Sources: No Soft Police! Event Recording organized by Interrupting Criminalization " No Soft Police,” a chapter in No More Police! written by Andrea Ritchie and Mariame Kaba (please email me if you would like assistance accessing the text or if you would like to buy the book for someone else!) Playing the Whore: The Work of Sex Work by Melissa Gira Grant, journalist and former sex worker Brown, Victoria Bissell. "Sex and the city: Jane Addams confronts prostitution." (2010). Mendes, P. (2020). Tracing the origins of critical social work practice. In Critical social work (pp. 17-29). Routledge. History of Social Work in the United States Links to sources available in transcript. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit ismatu.substack.com/subscribe…
I feel like i am in a zoo. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit ismatu.substack.com/subscribe
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Musings from my porch in Chicago that ask: am I good at hosting happiness? Am I the right shape to hold onto the life that I want? What noise do I make when I get knocked around? read this episode at ismatu.substack.com. Jazz of the episode: Why, Buzzardman, Why? x Alabaster Plume The Jordan River Song x Emahoy Tsege Mariam Gebru Lena’s Song x The Sweet Enoughs You Go To My Head x Billie Holiday Exit x Sebastian Mikael Still thinking of Jordan Neely. ismatu gwendolyn This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit ismatu.substack.com/subscribe…
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1 27 | the call and response of Collective Grief; to Jordan Neely 16:10
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on what we owe to each other in the grief. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit ismatu.substack.com/subscribe
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1 26 | Swapping Secrets with Courtnee Futch: what do you save for yourself when no one keeps you but The Stage? 1:23:27
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a conversation about survival, archival, and the intimacy found and lost when you grow up in the public eye. request the full transcript at ismatu.gwendolyn@gmail.com This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit ismatu.substack.com/subscribe…
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this is the next essay in the study of self series. listen to the previous episode here. Content warning for: mentions of suicidal thought and intent, allusions towards self-harm. Nothing graphic, but it is a recurrent theme of the piece. The first time I got recognized from TikTok, I was at a porn convention. [insert the really cute but compromising picture of me at said porn convention here. I most definitely cannot post this photo so just imagine xoxo <3] I need you to be right here with me in this moment. You are at a work event, crop topped and busty, see-through bedazzled mini skirt stretched over a bright pink thong, standing sure on seven-inch chrome Pleasers and an iconic bright pink mini afro (to match the thong, obviously). And you are freezing. Like, yes, it is cold in the convention center when you’re wearing this little clothing, but I mean deer in the headlights, this cannot be be happening freezing while knocking back your third (work-sanctioned) shot of the evening. Maaaaaaybe you’re wrong. Maybe you’re just intoxicated! Maybe you totally did not just hear someone gasp and say “ Oh my gosh, are you on TikTok?” to the back of your head. To you, the stripper. I’m not being a very helpful narrator— you and I both know that’s all just wishful thinking. LMAO you definitely did just hear that this shit is wild. Now what? You’ve been on TikTok for like… a month. No one prepared you for this eventuality so soon. Being recognized is for famous people!! What the fuck!!!! Do you think of a lie? You cannot just stand there omg think ! Think of a lie!! You’re draining the shot awkwardly and now you’re… swishing that casamigos around on your tongue? oh my word now you’re grimacing . Do something. Okay. You’re breathing out. That’s good!! You’re swallowing the shot. Great momentum. You are turning around on some newly found liquid courage and move to open your brilliant mouth and then this voice in the back of your head comes forward, all bright and toothy: Everyone can see you. Already. How did you manage to imagine this social media thing would never really affect your life? You can officially never go backwards. Hi. My name is Ismatu. I have for you an essay that used to be called, “on being surprised I bloomed sunflowers.” It comes to you in three acts, with the following thesis: One of the best ways, the kindest ways, the most lasting ways I can love myself is through archival. It’s through constant self-perseveration— not only “self-preservation” as in survival, but in my record of life. And because I love myself as a stitch in a quilt, a part of a whole, some of my archival belongs to the people that see me. Let’s begin. Act I: Germination My first era of life was spent in the lovingkindness of anonymity. Such is life in the mountains— one thing they will do is shelter you. Earth that’s stacked toward heaven like that is hard to get to know. She slow to like and she longer to love. Mountains and the love you find there press on you in ways that renegotiate time. They impress upon you timelessness. I appreciate moving slow from being brought up there. Mountains make you get to know your neighbors because you need each other to survive them. And the mountains I was raised in (the Colorado Rockies) were kind to me in their various reminders: that I was teeny and always will be. That clean, good air is a blessing. That I am lucky to be so small and yet held so gingerly by mighty Mama Earth. “We ourselves are only her fingertips, her eyelashes,” they chorus. “How big she is; how gentle all the same for choosing to hold your hand every day.” Mountains also remind you of how little you’ll ever know and it makes you breathe a sigh of relief. This world exudes stress in its constant quest to become larger than life; I was always content as a finite little being because of the mountains that made me. For me, life was about as long and thick as a tree— and I wasn’t dealt an easy life necessarily, but it had the character of ease, if that makes sense— there is only so much you allow yourself to be rushed when you can hear trees and what they say to you. They talk so low and so slow. It was a childhood where I felt the rise and fall of every day. I never, never woke up and thought, my goodness I can’t wait to be an adult. Colorado was my first love, which I first defined without realizing as how much I’d been given or how much I was willing to give without asking. I had a family with love in it, I had friends; my child body did not feel love and name it until I watched the winter sky bruise periwinkle with planets and stars that hung glittering over the peaks, like a lover loathe to leave. Until the sun set in the west at 10pm while I had my first honeysuckle. The breeze is sweet and I say, “ Oh. This is love.” I learned to journal in the cradle of the trees, actually. All my important conversations with myself and with God Creator happened at least twenty feet off the ground (as a security measure). The trees kept all my secrets, and I kept theirs. It was this one day in a garden when I was thirteen that they revealed to me I had their roots inside my chest cavity. That paper could keep me and my secrets just like they do. That I could belong to myself just as much as I belonged to everyone else— even more than that. That I was someone worth belonging to in the first place. I had my own self dangling from the end of my pen and tasted love for the second time. I didn’t know I’d been hiding from myself until I called my own name and heard an answer within me. Thirteen and dreaming of what selfhood feels like when the only person that owns me is me. Thirteen and looking at raspberries bend their whole plant because they’ve grown up to be thick and ripe and on display. Thirteen and thinking of what it could be like to be all ripe and ready like that. I named my notebook Thesilina and began to germinate. This is the blessing of anonymity: no one talks to a little Black girl up in a tree. No one asks you any probing questions. No one is interested in the minute of your day, not even your parents. Most days, no one even sees you— not many people think to look up when they walk outside. By the time I picked a pen and found myself, I had the freedom of zero follow-up questions and a 10pm curfew. Blessed, sweet privacy. No one in my family ever attempted to read what I wrote down— I truly don’t think my parents even thought about it. Invaluably, I was alone with myself feeling through my own desire for my body and my time and my own sovereignty. I don’t know that I’ve ever wanted anything worse than I wanted myself in my own entirety. Raspberries tasted just like me. I opened up pages and gobbled myself down. Act II: Stolen Blooms My love affair with myself began cataclysmic and I knew it even then. For one matter, I was dying. I told you: it was a life with ease of character, not ease of circumstances. My circumstances were, point blank, going to kill me (or I was going to put myself out of my own misery). The reasons why are for another essay, but for the purposes of this one: Death breathed and heaved over me like July stormclouds, just thick and delicious and promising to come cool and all at once. Dying young seemed like a neutral fact of life, like falling to sleep on Christmas Eve even while you try and fight it. Death was a matter of when, not if. I was also wrong to think in terms of ownership, and I knew it then too. A relationship with myself that could last (like, truly last) could only ever thrive in balance, with true agency reciprocity, where I choose myself and my body chooses me back and my mind oversees the union, and we move together like that. A daily choice, hesitantly made— long to love and slow to like. I knew I was rushing into things with someone I had quite literally just met, but I was teeny— when you are young like I was (and like I am), the world has a way of convincing you that everything you’ll ever be is right in front of your eyes. Plus, there was that whole matter of “ I’m pretty sure I’m not going to live to see sixteen.” I generally felt like I was moving on borrowed time so… might as well do it hot and fast, right? In the meeting and the keeping myself, I, Juliet, was my own Romeo. I will tell you this because I am endeavoring to be honest with you all: I did not fucking care. I knew I was being selfish and I could feel myself bottling up all this hot ash and I promise you I did not care. And I tried ! It’s not like I wanted to leave someone the trauma of finding me stilled and cooled and at peace. It just… it felt so good to luxuriate and decay in places no one else could see. I reached inside myself and found the earth and I said mine . And I began to bury me. This disposition intoxicated me, the thought that I could account for myself, and keep all of me, and not spill or share one singular drop. That I was mine and mine alone. It was good like when you’re doing drugs with no intent to come down. I assumed I’d be dead before I’d ever need to sober up. And then (there it is, the predictable and then ), Words began to find their way out of me. It happened in public, which is the most embarrassing part! Somebody fucked up and handed me a mic. I could tell you who, in fact: it was my youth pastor ( lame ). I was a child and so I could not see that I was silly for thinking I could have my own secrets. I hand’t yet understood that other people saw things that I hadn’t developed the eyes for. I also have one of the loudest dispositions I have ever seen radiate off a person; my thoughts flash across my face with the strength and clarity of a gospel choir soprano. It was truly so unserious of me to think I could keep all my own secrets that young. Like. Imagine having a chest full of trees and deluding yourself into thinking that no one can see the branches but you. I could not own my own soils any more than I could own the earth, and me and the mountains are the same thing. Slow to like, long to love, visible for miles and miles around. It’s just that at that time, the only example I had of love was one rooted in possession and ownership. I did not know how to exist in community with myself— I did not even know that was possible. Even in speaking, in learning to navigate a mic and a stage and a spotlight, it wasn’t really for me. It was for “sharing my God-given talents with the world.” Read: it was for white adults who applauded me while I died in front of them, and I was so eager to please. Growing up in the white evangelical Christian church made me such a glutton for pain. White folks with money really do love to watch a Black Girl Bleed. Agony on display in my essays and in my poetry and they applaud. I am dying in front of you, I would rumble into the mic. And that declaration would always be followed up with a bigger mic, a larger stage, and more applause. This is the first time you ever hear that honest, toothy voice, bright in your mind voice from back to front: Hey. Hey. Everyone can see you. Are you certain you want to be seen like this? I think, after all this, I became a recluse. I was too young to love the stage— I didn’t have the wherewithal to make that choice. When you start existing in that kind of emotional nudity at fourteen, and when you do so for survival, you don’t really have time to think about your relationship to performance. I didn’t love the stage; I didn’t like the stage; it just was a part of my week. The loose warmth of something familiar and not altogether unpleasant. As neutral as Death himself. I am dying, I wrote and was handed a scholarship. We are dying, I penned and was handed research money. More stages. More money. Bigger mics. Nothing to ever fix the problems. Sometime in college, while I lost family to poverty and to stress, and while Ebola was still a case study in my Global Health courses, this stitch of time where I had to wade between this life and this death to find the cadence of every day— this was the time I realized I was owned. I saw how brilliant Pain is and why it’s so lucrative. How… ritualistic all of this was. How much my blood looks like diamonds. How much they (the audience, waiting bated-breath) is willing to pay for my blood. Diamonds. I want it in diamonds, since I am so sacred to the ritual of this world order. These people are going to pay for my blood in diamonds. Once I realized the precarity of my place, that the love of institution was still just ownership by other names (like publication), I came to a screeching halt. I was a senior in college and I blamed it on burn out. It was so much more than just exhaustion. It was repulsion at coming to understand that I has sold my mind, my fertile earth, to the academy without even realizing. That this life of mine was built on turning my thoughts into some tangible, supple thing that Bleeds so I could tack it with some words— a butterfly pinned shiny on a cork board. Pieces of flesh stitched together with someone’s humanity and immortalized on the page. This university that paid for my health insurance and new laptops in exchange for my fertile earth. These were not the pages of the trees that once held regard for me. This was love in ownership, again . There is no freedom in the academy. I had pimped my mind out to a new age plantation and they wanted me to pretend like I liked it. Graduate school began to knock and I was celebrated. I received the prize for all my scholastic excellence: more hard work. I shut my mind off. She had seen enough. Nothing in my purse but lipgloss, a MacBook and a change of hell. What was coming next was not safe for us; I didn’t know how to keep our secrets anymore. I didn’t even trust myself. I kissed my pen and put her in the pocket between one rib and another. I graduated college; I did not publish my thesis; I began my master’s program and I laid us all to rest with a two line refrain. I have misplaced my seams. My grief spills everywhere. Act III: What I Owe to the Sun I don’t have much to say in public about my time as a dancer, except that I appreciated it for its honesty. There was no delusion or pretense to the job— your body is on display and you are paid accordingly. Literally just like academia, except better paid and with far more agency over your day to day. The strip club is a place where you actually need to be honest with yourself, because there are some bits of you cannot come into work. There is no money at the club waiting for you if you are not capable of a precise, thorough self inventory. I shed what I need to when I take off my sweats. My brain gets put in a jar, and the jar in my locker. This process was very rinse and repeat with me. Beauty rituals require brutal self appraisal as a daily practice of sanctification. I never really surprise myself with the parts of me that make it out of the locker room— I have been performing my whole life. Upgrade your subscription to read fun things like the above and also help me attend my local farmer’s market. We flash forward a handful of years in a montage of black lights and white lingerie and morning-after alcohol. This is really why I don’t talk much about the club— it’s fr one part spite towards a nosy ass internet and three parts because I would run out of things to say five minutes into an essay. It is more or less uneventful. Sure, every now and again Something Happens, but most days, it’s just Tuesday. Every day is a Tuesday. My life tumbles forward. I renegotiate myself at the start of every day on what I am and what I would like to keep. Except. Except. Here is our final and then. And then, after I’d been in the ring for a while, long enough to know better than what I was doing, I started swinging myself around on the pole. Just to try it. Just to see if I could. Because I was too fucked up to say, no, maybe it isn’t a stellar idea to try flips for the first time with an audience and a stomach full of cucumbers, hummus, and champagne. Because I was sick with envy that other girls were better dancers than me. Because I didn’t realize I still had this unrealized dream of dancing on the world’s stage, where everyone could see me. I am not pristine enough for the world’s stage, and I am too much of a perfectionist to embarrass myself, but this... this was most certainly not an audience of everyone. And I was so, so intoxicated. I flipped myself over and started flying. I don't think I've hit the ground yet. The first night I ever pole-danced (as in, really fucking did that shit pole danced ), I pulled an inversion I’ve only ever seen me do in my dreams. I was fucked up and in new heels because mine broke on me during my last stage set, and I wasn’t about to go home, I had my prettiest lingerie on. I remember hearing my first ever stage song play over me diamonds on my neck, di- diamonds on my wrists. And I remembered what these people owe to me. And I remember thinking to the chorus that lives in my head, this stage is going to be soaked by the time I’m done. And my body found its way into spinning, upside down, arms in front of me, grabbing my back leg, hanging there like a ballerina in a snow globe. And money rained down. Here is that bright and toothy voice, who I now call Auntie Dae: It’s a shame everyone can’t see you do this. You are a star. You love the stage. You were born a dancer. Remember? Oh. I… do. I love the stage. I think I missed the stage. This was also a stage in life where I was passively dying. As much as the club low-key saved my life, I was only ever so attached— here enough to function and to drink and little more. Remember where we are in this season of life: gone past the mountains years ago, fooling folks into thinking I’m a true blue city bitch, hiding my brilliance from graduate school so the university cannot take myself from me again, hiding my real identities and signifiers at work for my own safety, hiding my work from my family, somehow never hiding from myself because I needed an honest self inventory to survive all this. A secret that radiated off me: I was not doing a great job at surviving all this. I felt the familiar cool, delicious storm clouds swirling above me and thought, not at all startled: those clouds are so low I can’t see my hands in front of me . I remembered the last time I couldn’t see anything past my current age. I was fifteen. That was the year I tried to kill myself and failed. I was there at 23, watching me drink bottle after bottle of work-sponsored top shelf liquor and thinking somewhere distant, maybe I should save myself. Followed up with a revision, when that felt like too grand a task, maybe I should save bits of myself somewhere. Just in case I survive this, like I keep doing. I will want to know what happened to me. So I did two things. I kept one notebook over three years (a record low but it was better than nothing). And I picked up TikTok, at least in part, to have a means of documentation of myself in spite of my hiding. Maybe that’s just me making a story out of things— but never in my life had I really felt like I had things to say to the public until now, in this season of hibernation. One last bit of crucial honesty before we get back to the plot: writing and keeping record of myself and my circumstances was crucial to my survival as a teenager. I am going to talk about this openly because I think a decent amount of teenagers follow me, and because I am a mental health professional, and because I would have loved it if more adults were honest with me about suicidality. There was a time after my suicide attempts (on and off from fifteen to twenty-three) where I did not have the will to live, I just lacked the will to die. Death is a commitment in a way the shuffle of every day life is not. Just because I did not actively want to be alive anymore does not mean I magically wanted to stay . I had incredibly important spiritual revelations after 15 about choice and destiny and being anchored to this world. My understanding had grown: I was meant to be on this earth still. I just had no idea why. It was a day to day that I characterize as the Chicago winter impressing itself on the skyline: every day is gray. Some days, the fog is lower than others. We went on like this until my brain clicked into place at almost 24. [This sounds corny but I am so serious. You can trust me to be honest and so I am telling you: life really does get better when your brain is done growing. Please hang in there.] Anyways. I am there, breaths from my next stage of life that I do not know is coming yet, a couple years into the club, a couple years into graduate school, having made a full revolution (as in all the way back to start) around the ten year anniversary of me answering a notebook’s call and deeming myself worth writing down. I made a TikTok (just one video) because I was attempting to pretend it wasn’t that deep. And then I immediately went viral. THIS is our last and then, forget what I said earlier: you make your cute lil speaking video and then the first TikTok you ever make goes viral. Look at you, foolish! You called the Stage and she came running. What did you think would happen? And you look good on the stage. There’s the truth. You are supposed to be up here. We’re at the end of the montage and you are easing yourself into the spotlight, just barely. You’re trying to pretend like it’s super normal to hit six figure follower counts in as many weeks. Life is still fractured, and that is okay. It gets glued together bit by bit and it’s good for you to learn patience. We are back here at this moment when this lady clocks you while you are * insert stripper name here* and startles you speechless. [Ha! You. Speechless. Anyways.] You cannot think of a lie so you just smile and say yes, you are. And she’s cool. In fact, she says, “it makes you cooler, knowing that you do this. That you are like a really full person off screen.” Leaving you wondering what it would be like if everyone on the internet knew. If you family knew. If one day your life was not so dissected and pinned apart and you didn’t have to pretend like you were ashamed of yourself. Maybe the mess belongs on stage just as much as you do. And this time, the stage is on more of my own terms. Not quite, not all the way. But certainly more than before, at the club. At church. At school. You have more freedom to expand and contract and so many kind people watching you. People are watching us. People are taking inspiration and joy from us when you yourself could not give myself those things. And instead of constant dying and constant public spectacle, we balance the hardness of things. I have always been one to wear my hardships on my wrists and now here I am having folks assume I had a rich kid life with healthy attachments to my parents. Befuddling. Amazing. Look how fast you found yourself, sharing us in moments, in morsels of time you found lovely. Then… just like that. Self-documenting. Archival. I cannot help but love myself, even when I do not like myself. And what better love than the love of being kept, collected, considered? a brief letter to me on my 23rd birthday entitled, “forgive me for spoiling the ending.” At the time this picture was taken, you have only just begun to understand how vast you are and how pointless it is to try and underperform. You were raised up by the mountains and cemented in the sun. You, a Leo! You thought you could run and hide when you got scared. Imagine thinking you’d be raspberries your whole life. You are a grown-up now. You have made it to adulthood and you are surprised your flowers changed and bloomed. Welcome to your era of sunflowers. I am an amalgamation of the people that built me and if I am honest, good and honest, I have been built in part by the public eye. I have been pieced together by and under the center spotlight. Fourteen was such a tender age to take the stage ; there are some ways I will never unsee my body as opportunity ; it was what it is. I can never go backwards, and me hiding wasn’t backwards, it was around again in the same orbit. All it did was delay the inevitable. When I speak, it feels like branches are shooting out of my chest. I am most rooted when I feel my voice carry on the sun rays. People from all over the world listen in on your lives, on your podcast, quite literally on your musings and solidifies what I already knew: the reason we prohibited social media in our life as a teenager is because we knew what would happen to me if the internet saw me speak. How hilarious it is that I thought I could run! I was always going to be up here. You were built by the sun; you owe those rays you soaked up a second chance at shining. Well, beloved, you survive. You survive your next big heartbreak and your freakouts about graduate school and your wild ass landlords. You survive the pilgrimage home and back to yourself, night after night. Era after era. So much gumption! My stars, you amaze me. I will spoil this ending for you, which is just the middle of my own block. I am still here, making notes in the margins for us. I have new questions of love to consider; they are as follows. How do I love myself best in public? What is self love when a part of me always belongs to the people? I haven’t reread the notebook you kept loosely during this time but I cannot wait love and love, @ismatu.gwendolyn, one year in Final thoughts: archival is not only a study of self. it is a declaration of love. I love myself and so I want to remember. I am enthralled with the smallest bits of this life seeding and sprouting years later, when I have the fertile earth to hold onto them. I surprise myself with what I grow, even still, after all this time. I expected to look back and see the wildflowers of my youth littered everywhere the wind blows. I am shocked, ten years later, to see what fourteen year old planted in their left hand as she wrote to me with her right: there, blooming up from the margins: stocky, bright, thick-stemmed flowers turning their face up to the sun. I keep myself and in doing so, I declare me worth keeping. And this time, I open up my garden heart to the people that see and see me, that have found ways to love me in sincerity with even the smallest glimpses of my life. I spare a seed where I am able. I know I am in a temporary space and I am flying all the same. I hope the work of your day passes through your hands with ease. I hope you have something left over to say to your future self at the end of the day. warmest regards, ismatu g. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit ismatu.substack.com/subscribe…
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Threadings.

1 24 | There is no safety in being Beautiful: reflections from a life spent On Display (™) 1:24:34
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A child model turned grad school stripper speaks openly about the reality of being shackled to Beauty (and the negotiations you make at the top of the hierarchy). Read the full essay at ismatu.substack.com. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit ismatu.substack.com/subscribe…
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Threadings.

1 23 | Love Studies + Black Feminism: my study of self 22:34
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Welcoming in Season II of Threadings. Notes on my the orbit of my personhood. An essay once titled, “how do I love myself?” (but I didn’t know what I meant by “love,” so first i sound it out) Themes of the essay: love is the feeling that compels you to action and the action itself. Poetry is the thesis of my life and practicing it is an act of love. Black feminism and love studies are, in many ways, the same discipline. I am just as much of the earth as the mountains are. Read the full essay at ismatu.substack.com. Next episode in The Study of Self: love of my physical being This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit ismatu.substack.com/subscribe…
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1 22 | dinner with a capitalist in amsterdam, $115k, and other things that changed my life 30:59
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in which I tell you about where I've been, where I've ended up, and where I'm going from here. Jazz of the episode: Send In The Clowns x Pat Martino On the Sunny Side of the Street x Johnny Hodges For All We Know x Ahmad Jamal Lilacs in the Rain x Junior Mance Dat Dere (Theme) x Bobby Timmons Trio The Summer Knows x Bucky Pizzarelli Down and Out x Joel Lyssarides Tangerine x George Van Eps Inflight x Lennie Tristan’s, Lenny Popkin Golden Earrings x Jan Lundgren Trio Land of Dreams x Ahmad Jamal Gungala Serenata x Luigi Malatesta, Franco Bitcoin, Sandro Brugnolini Blue and Sentimental x Oscar Peterson My Wish x Hank Jones This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit ismatu.substack.com/subscribe…
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1 21| on loving my parents again and again (read: on learning to love myself) 24:55
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musings once entitled, “a therapist reflects on the whiplash of finally having relationships with my parents i am grateful for, despite it all.” In which I watch the love I have for my parents bloom and die and bloom again. Full transcription available at ismatu.substack.com Jazz of the episode: Cicada Season x Fuubutsushi Manhattan x BLOSSOM DEARIE Melancholia x Wynton Marsalis The Single Petal Of A Rose x Ben Webster You Go To My Head x Frank Sinatra Michelle x Yusuf Lateef Easy Living x Clifford Brown This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit ismatu.substack.com/subscribe…
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1 20| a love letter to my seven year old self: reproductive justice is economic justice 48:30
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We owe the children of this world tangible and lasting justice— and economic justice touches every kind of oppression there is. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit ismatu.substack.com/subscribe
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1 19| a manifesto: dear internet friends, I’m burning alive. 14:36
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an open letter to everyone fearful and exhausted, sent with love. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit ismatu.substack.com/subscribe
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Ismatu Gwendolyn, clinical social worker and former impoverished child, doubles down on the ugly (and obvious) truth of why poverty exists in the first place. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit ismatu.substack.com/subscribe…
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an essay nearly entitled, “the orange trees teach me art-making.” This essay is a continuation of my prolonged look at revolutionary healers in practice to become one— where healing also includes artistry. What is my role as an freedom-minded artist, this side of revolution? Check the link to donate to the universal basic income program for Ebola Survivors in Kenema, Sierra Leone below! https://msha.ke/ismatu Theses: A (art-making) = B(world-making) = C (truth-telling) ( 1 ) One of the greatest powers held in the human sovereign world is the power to create and destroy: to make, shape and reshape the world and what we know to be true. I call this world-making. ( 2 ) We are currently at war and (I would argue) in the exposition of a new world. ( 3 ) This world is still actively being made. What constitutes power in the hands of the masses? What methods of world-making are truly available to us? All sources available at ismatu.substack.com. Jazz of the Episode (sampling): Melancholia x Wynton Marsalis For All We Know x Ahmad Jamal Why, Buzzardman, Why? X Alabaster DePlume Tezeta x Mulatu Astatke My Odoh - African Lofi x Lofi Afrobeats This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit ismatu.substack.com/subscribe…
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1 toni cade bambara: i start with the recognition that we are at war 1:14:09
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captioned live! we took one hour to read four paragraphs together. excerpt from: Conversations with Toni Cade Bambara, edited by Thabiti Lewis. I don’t usually save my lives because (1) that requires editing and I am already drowning in administrative work and (2) I enjoy existing in temporal space for only a moment in time, rather than being replayable and rewatchable and forwardable all the time. it’s a weird thing to watch happen to your personhood. but this one i found to be really lovely and helpful, so here it is. i hope you enjoyyy. correct video transcript available at ismatu.substack.com. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit ismatu.substack.com/subscribe…
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1 you’ve been traumatized into hating reading (and it makes you easier to oppress). 39:54
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In which we engage the following theses: (1) the ruling class benefits from illiteracy. (2) short-form video entertains more than it sticks. (3) reading is a discipline distinct from listening, watching, or other forms of literacy. It’s a skill that needs to be honed separately. (4) Absolutely no one comes to save us but us. Full and accurate transcript available at ismatu.substack.com. Thank you for listening <3 Jazz of the Episode: The Jordan River Song x Emahoy Tsege Mariam Gebru Lena’s Song x The Sweet Enoughs Sunset and the Mocking Bird x Duke Ellington Abusey Junction x Kokoroko Udo x The Cavemen. Muziqa heywete x Getatchew Mekurya Mogoya x Oumou Sangaré Drume Negrita x Andy Bey Tony x Larry Morezo, Dennis Tini Melancholia x Wynton Marsalis Spring Yaounde x Wynton Marsalis This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit ismatu.substack.com/subscribe…
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internet friends, I am still burning alive. Today is February 10, 2024, which marks two years since my entrance into the social internet. This has been a terrifying, incredible, world-changing transition— maybe not (yet) for the world, but most certainly for my world. I did not have any social media previous to virality on my first TikTok video. Honestly? I viewed these spaces as nothing more than cannon fodder for the degradation of the mind and of any true, real, lasting community. I wanted no part. I made a video because I wanted to tell a silly story on this silly new app, and because I had 17 followers (all of which I knew in real life), and because I was still busy swallowing the griefs of this world. I wanted to do something that felt… silly. And inconsequential. I am chuckling to myself, in hindsight. To be clear: I was right to be fearful of these spaces. Do you know how long it’s taken me to fully realize that every view, every point on a metric, is a living, moving someone interacting with my personhood? My face and voice are public record. I am watching myself become infused with authority I did not ask for and did little to earn. The visibility alone … not everyone that sees me feels kindly. I was right to be wary and skeptical and terrified. And these apps do allow us to cosplay learning and mimic connectivity when we are deeply lonely in real life. These apps are actively drugging our minds. And. You all have fundamentally restructured what I conceive of as reality . Online is most definitely real life! And we— this community, what I call my Constituency— have accomplished amazing things and truly, if you knew what I am working to prepare us for off-screen. We are just starting. We are just starting. Recently, I made public my feelings of burnout and exhaustion with the amount of people that are contented with short-form video. I have come to detest the medium; video— especially video that is under fifteen minutes— is very good at convincing the viewer they are doing something active. The amount of people that watch me and feel like they have learned something, when in reality they are watching me learn— it astounds me. I wonder if I am taking part in placating us as a community rather than galvanizing us towards action that’s truly necessary. There were so many comments under that video— too many to read, but one I caught over and over again: never stop writing. Listen: that was never on the table. I said I might stop making videos — I was always going to write. I have absolutely been battling hopelessness, despair, dissolution and defeatism about how difficult it is to accomplish basic shit— to get folks to make the transition from passive watcher to active learner. I spent two weeks taking time with my teachers: my loved ones, here and gone. They reminded me how powerful it is to be able to hide in plain sight. I am using my fertile mind to bloom this community— you who read, who write, who change their real lives. This was always the plan. I refuse to waste our time. I want this community to live long past my last video, to have ripple effects that I will never know about and never see. I got like, four more years in this iteration of online space, give or take a year. We have a very finite amount of time to mobilize around ideas that are for our good, the good of the masses, the good of the people, the world-keepers of tomorrow. The world- makers of today. Nothing about this is idealistic. I am not being poetic or metaphorical. The work is urgent and calls every one of us. Excerpt from a poem: The Lesson by Afeni Shakur Thesis: Revolutionary is not some lofty, miraculous, singular idea nor title. Revolution is not a singular event. It is a beginning . It’s a marriage . And We (the People) have a world to retake and rebuild! There is no sweeter call. We owe it to one another to commit ourselves to the rest of our shared lives. The freedom song drives me wild— I do not earn the song, I only respond to the call— I AM A REVOLUTIONARY! I AM A REVOLUTIONARY! So I ask you, those of us that know me in these spaces, that give me the space and kind consideration to be a teacher and a healer and a mobilizing agent: our task is to be mobilized enough to outlive me easily. How can we ensure that? What are our communal values? How do we wish to continue? What do we need and want from me, the person at the front of the room? How do we practice reciprocity? How do we ensure that the Constituency outlives me? What have I not thought of yet? I’ll tell you what I want: to be forgotten. I want to be deeply insignifcant and unremarkable. I have accepted this momentary role as catalyst, as a teacher, as a launching point. A space of radical contagion— that is fine. It feels above me. I AM A REVOLUTIONARY. And: I want you, each of us, all of us to become so wrapped up in the condition of our children(’s children’s children’s children) that we forget about I and me , such that we dissolve into a love that erodes boundaries. Like Sonnet XVII — so close that your hand on my chest is my hand. So close that your freedom dreams bloom in my sleep. Among my greatest wish is to be unremarkable; a face among many; one stone in the mountain, that we do not see as a collection of little pebbles but as a mountain full in herself, whole on her own and majestic in range, a return to sovereign earth. The beautiful exchange: we climb and catch the song of liberation and fall and rise again. Dissolve into the soil! I AM A REVOLUTIONARY! I AM A REVOLUTIONARY! DISCORD LINK: https://discord.gg/9d4SVjXY four more years, friends. my mind expands all the time. thank you for the motivation to consider freedom. what a life. i hope the work of your day passes through your hands with ease. i hope that work brings us closer to the sweet plum of freedom on the other side. and i’ll see you all there— or simpler said: peace. ig Post script: I provided the discord link so that we could discuss the above questions. How do we want to exist? Where do we want to exist? I want these spaces to be Black and Indigenous led specifically. I want these spaces to be one of prolonged learning, of trying and failing, of asking questions of frsutration of joy of hope, of space foro the full iteration of human emotion and of spaces that allow us to be vulnerable enogh to change. at least to start. we’re blooming something. I don’t want to shy away. You don’t have to earn the call of revolutionary, you have to answer it. I AM A REVOLUTIONARY. I AM A REVOLUTIONARY. Jazz of the episode: Drume Negrita (Afro-Cuban Lullaby) x Andy Bey Lena’s Song x The Sweet Enoughs Abusey Junction x Kokoroko This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit ismatu.substack.com/subscribe…
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1 everything is free! no more paywalls. have tea with me. 21:34
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Threadings. and quite literally everything I do is free! I only can do this because people voluntarily pay! Wow! Thank you!!!! Transcription below because someone asked for the still words. Long time no see. Hi there. If you're new here, which if you're here, I doubt you're new. I mean, but just in case. My name is Ismatu. E-S-M-A-TU. I like E, S like S, not like Z. Not Ismatu, not Ismatu, Ease, like Easter egg. Ease-matu. One day. I will be an Ismaltu that other people can say, oh yeah, like Ismaltu, like Ismaltu Gwendolyn. It's gonna be a great day, hi. I have pistachio tea on screen, a stack of notebooks, a increasingly worn copy of How to Go Mad without Losing Your Mind, and a need to situate myself such that I'm not making so much noise with the mic. Hold on, hold on. Okay, starting now. I should have put my glasses. Hi there. Grab your tea, I'm having pistachio as per usual. It also has roasted almonds in it because I'm on the go right now. I didn't bring all my florals. I do so love a nutty floral. Long time no see. I generally don't like being on video because my face and voice are now public record in a way that alarms me. But we can't go backwards. Hi, it's good to see you. I'm out here making housing and security look very cute. It looks like a cute place, right? You're sitting in the window sill right now. It's a lovely winter's day in Brooklyn. I would otherwise be really excited to be here if I were not here for the passing of a loved one. Which thank you for your condolences, by the way. I'm receiving a lot of kind messages. None of this feels particularly real. And if the past is any indication. This is just gonna be something that I remembered. I'm gonna be going about my day going, God, I really wanna talk to Baba about, oh right. Oh my gosh, I can't wait to tell Baba, oh right. Let me text Baba and tell him I was thinking. like that. I'm making this video not to cry on camera. So you all know how much I love that. but to talk to you all about some changes that I am making existing online. Which is, I really have been, I don't want to say slacking, but sincerely deep prioritizing being here with the patrons and the substachians, the substichites, the substichanders. Stubstiganders is actually very cute and I'm keeping it. The Patreons, the Stubstiganders, mostly because I am not compelled by money. So the idea of making extra content to reward people for giving me money was always just such a low burner, especially with the other things that's on my plate. You know, familial duties, personal duties, the reading and writing for short form and long term projects, organizing on the continent and also in the United States for some, I just like- for some care infrastructure that I've been feeling is necessary. More on that later as per usual. So that means that like making extra content for people that pay to support me was always kind of like a, when I get the extra energy, when I get the extra time, when I get the extra focus, I will give you my extra, you know, you're paying for extras. And I find that uncompelling for a couple of reasons. The first being that because I am not compelled by money, it never really becomes a priority. You know what I'm saying? If the idea is, oh, I make extra things so that people who wish to support me continue to have incentive to support me, I actually don't care about being broke. As you can see, again, chronic housing insecurity. I'm more housed than I have been since I lived in Chicago, and it's still quite precarious. It is tough to not have a permanent address in the United States, it makes everything difficult. And I shouldn't be surprised at how long it's taking me to come back into like fully fledged housing, but it's again, really tough. Like I still don't make enough to qualify for renting. So I mean, I should be motivated. I should be motivated. And I just am not. And then secondly, it undermines what I want to do with this space. So people that pay to support me, especially at this point in time, because I give you so little, I have to imagine that you're here because you want me to be well. Because even if I don't care about being poor and destitute, you all are like, that's not a reality that we want you waiting in. Because in honesty, you're right. I shouldn't be skating towards financial disaster and catastrophe all the time. I agree. There should be many layers of safety between me and death by preventable disease. death by hypothermia, death by substance abuse, because truly the only way that you can survive chronic housing insecurity and or homelessness is drugs. It's drugs, it's the only thing that makes it tolerable, et cetera. So you're right. I keep coming back to this email that I got a while ago, sometime in like, I think like October or some shit. And they said, you can't die. If you die, you don't understand there's nobody that does what you do. There's nobody to replace you in your online spaces and in your real life spaces. You actually cannot move like this. You have to consider yourself more precious. It's essentially the text of the email. I haven't stopped thinking about that. I'm trying to reconcile that with, yes, but I'm not motivated by money. So why? Yeah, I just, I think what's happening for me is that I don't want you all to be motivated by production from me. Cause what kind of has happened less and less so, but like, especially at the beginning of things, you know, I would set up paid spaces and I would promise perks. And my ability to fulfill those perks, which I'm still behind on fulfilling, I still work on it, especially cause the perks that I have in mind and the perks that I promise. are labor intensive and time intensive. They take like a lot of time and care, so I can't do them very fast. And so many people wrote me letters and I just, I refuse to half-ass that. So if I write three letters a week, that means, and I got 300 letters, it takes a long time to get back to people. But I still am. What happens is the emphasis is on my production. You did it to get something extra for me so that if that thing comes slowly or not at all, then subscription drops. And then it makes it something that I can't actually depend on consistently and like I already said I'm already not motivated by money in the first place. So I just You understand what I'm trying to say I hope so what I want is to take Support from of me and my work away from the idea of production So I have decided that we're starting over with the patreon and with the sub stack. I was sharing the things that I was sharing, A, to practice, just to get my feet wet with what it feels like to create things consistently, to create audio, to create visuals, to do all these things. And all I really had was the models of content creators and influencers that came before me. Now, I don't fuck with either of those two terms. My primary job on the internet, I do not think is content creation. My primary job on the internet is not influencer. I don't... I'm not really here to change the minds and hearts of the populace. I'm here existing in public because it keeps me accountable to the public. And I'm here sharing what I learned, which is not feel like content. Like we don't call authors content creators. We don't call music production content creators. So I'm not a content creator because I'm an essayist or because I'm existing online content. The idea of entertainment. is so superfluous to what I am actually doing here. I am a public teacher. This is actually what I wanted when I was graduating from grad school and thinking about the job market and looking at jobs that just like bored me. There was exactly two jobs that I was really excited about. And I got really far like in the processes for being considered before they, you know, went to people that have more experience than me because I was just graduating. Job market's tough. One was in curriculum development for English and teaching that curriculum to like high school level students and one was in a policy think tank for public health that was localized to a specific urban region. And remarkably both of those things are things that I do now with my day today. So I'm not a content creator, I'm a public educator. That's what I'm doing here. I have a syllabus that lives, that is directly affected by the questions that you all ask me and the ways that you engage with me. And I have projects and capstone projects that you all are and will be, continue to be involved in, that have to do with public health and safety. And obviously there comes a lot of education within that as well, because that is my field of study. I have two degrees in public health now, global health, and one degree in English. So I'm doing what I want to be doing. None of that is about the creation of like things that are designed to entertain. None of that is about content. I just, the fact that I am existing in video and audio format is just the medium, the vehicle in which I can come to you with the things that I hope and dream for myself and for us as a collective. What I'm finding is that short form video land, so TikTok and Instagram, and even long form video land with YouTube, which... I keep promising a return. It's gonna happen. It's just that I can't come back to YouTube without finishing up the Malcolm X series. One, the person that I wanted to talk to about that is Babaseku. So give me a second. And then two. Yeah, give me a second. All forms of video and just existing online in a way that the public can interact with me. suck like respectfully like uh any kind of video i think because it's so ubiquitous to society at this point in time because we view these people that are making art as content creators instead of artists opens you a lot like opens you to the wide heights and depths of the internet it opens you to being recirculated in ways that you do or do not consent to um and it makes it so question, comment, recommendation that is helpful to my thinking and to my praxis. Every actual thing that I find helpful has a couple on this side and a couple on this side. And this side is like the angelification of me, the me becoming like a deity or a legend or someone that is above critique, where I can do no wrong and that is dehumanizing. And then the other side in which I am. the devil incarnate, an agent of chaos, someone who is actively out to sabotage the collectives of liberation that I am a part of via identity. And that is also dehumanizing. I don't enjoy either of those things. And they, if I read too much of that, it warps my sense of personhood. That sort of consumption of what people feel about themselves projected onto me is... not really something I wish to engage in, which means that I can't really read the comments on TikTok and Instagram anymore. I don't read YouTube comments. I don't check my notifications. I don't see, like I can't actually interact with people in the ways that I would like to. So I think what I'm going to be using these spaces for is to talk about the things that I am learning in real time. Because usually by the time that I've like made a video about something and it's circulating on these short form. Um. places because I know that my reach is wide and far. I'm well read. I am well situated. I feel comfortable enough to say, to make a claim, to state a thesis statement. I'm still comfortable to be wrong. I can be wrong about anything, but I'm definitely not. If I'm ever talking about a text in public, I've read it at least twice, usually three times. So I want spaces where I can learn in real time and have first draft thoughts because first draft thoughts are not safe for the general internet. And I think that's what I'm going to use those spaces for. These spaces for. The Patreon, the Substaganders, that's what I would like to be doing here. And I think these are also spaces that are niched down enough, not quite small, not quite large, but just like the people that engage with me on Patreon, the people that engage with me on Substack are here because they like... what I have to bring to the table and they want to discuss with me. I think that you all work to see me as someone who is just like a finite person and not someone that solely exists in their video screen or someone who has much stock in the idea of being legendary. I'm just a person. The conundrum that I've been having is, well, that's educational work. Like I'm just, I'm talking about my thoughts, I'm learning in public by proxy. People also learn as I do that. So how do I charge for that if my work is free? Like if everything educational, if my best work is the work that I think that people can learn from is free and is free on purpose, why wouldn't I just give that away for free? And that's been at loggerheads because it's like, these paid spaces are supposed to be paid and they're supposed to incentivize people to support me and da da. That's why you make extra stuff. but the whole extra thing doesn't compel me to do it because then I'm motivated by money and I'm not motivated by money. And if the thing that I actually want to be doing in these spaces is essentially like long form book clubs, listen, this is an amazing text. Hey, remember when I said she cute and she thick? This is dense and good. It is prose, it's prose poetry, prose, prose poetry. Okay, it's so like, you can see how haggard this is becoming. Ben's terps, okay. A Ripper 2, Doodles and the Margins. Okay, I love this book. I keep returning to it. I keep rereading it. And I don't have time to talk about the rest of the text. Most people, especially with academic books like these, they only read the first chapter because it's a prolonged thesis. And that's good. If you only read the first chapter, lovely. And also I wanna read the whole book. I don't have time to do that on my big social media. I have a syllabus to get through that I'm already, I don't wanna say behind on. But we have work to do, you know what I'm saying? I have projects, I'm working with multiple kinds of people on the things that we're gonna be talking about. So I wanna take these spaces to talk about what I'm reading. I also have Thomas Sankara in the corner over there. I started talking about that in live on TikTok. I want a space to be able to repost my lives without fear of them getting redistributed in big ways. You know what I'm saying? And all of that's very educational work. It's work that I enjoy. It feels like an office hours situation. and you don't pay to go to office hours. So I'm starting over with the Patreon and with the sub stack. Everything that I think should, I've gone through it again and I've made free what I think should stay up and things that I made with a specific audience in mind. Like also one of the reasons I was posting specifically to paid tiers is because it denotes at least some sense of adulthood. If you have your own money to be able to spend to give me a couple dollars a month, you are likely in... in have enough agency over your life to have your own bank account and your own finances. So I was kind of using that as a metric for like making sure that like kid kids aren't here because there are some kids that follow me and like to engage with my work. And I was not about to be, some things are for adults. But I just like, I don't really wanna have conversations without kiddos. I like the kids, I like the teeny boppers. I like that like 12, 13, 14 year olds are here. I think your ideas are incredible. and I wanna hear what you have to say. And I don't wanna exclude you from the learning because you can't afford to pay for it. What is it? When I was 12, $5 was a million dollars. When I was 12, $5 was like a cupcake, a very big cupcake from the bakery that I could walk to. And that is about a million dollars as 12, as a 12 year old. So, I'm just gonna do all of this for free. I hope that you weren't here specifically because you felt like you had special East Montsue content because I'm not. Any more special in the space I am in big spaces? I don't really want the incentive on your side to be exchange for extra. I want the incentive to be because you care about me. And I'm here. I want my incentive for being here to be because I care about you. So it's all just gonna be free. We're starting over. And this frees me up a lot to just exist without having to make a product or something compelling or fancy or what have you. And I can just breathe. And you'll know that when I'm here, it's because I wanna be here and not because I feel like I have to. Yeah. All right, well. What time is it? That's about all. In terms of loose life updates, I'll talk about those ones when I feel like talking about my. Nothing is easy. There's a lot of ease, but it's not easy, if that makes sense. Even amidst tumultuous circumstances and difficulties. This is the most blessed I've ever been. You know what I mean? Blessed in the original etymology of the world is someone played in blood for the amount of freedom that I get to have every day. And it's my job to continue the work of making sure that everybody that interacts with me and comes after me, however much after actually exists because colonialism really fucked up time. I want freedom to be contagious. Just like hope. Thank you for watching. I wanna do more of this. And I'm excited to be back in spaces, Patreon, subscandies, where you all can talk to me and I can see you and I don't have to worry about being assaulted with the ways I am more or less than little h human. It's very nice to just exist without complexities or pride. The internet continues to grow bigger and bigger and bigger. And I stay the same size. And everything growing means that I have me that goes outside of me. And that's difficult for my brain to reconcile. And I have never been so well suited to make my dreams reality. So I can't go backwards. It's just gonna help for me to have as much little space as I can possibly hold onto because there's gonna come a day where I'm not on the internet anymore, where I don't do this, where I can't talk directly to you like this. So I'm gonna enjoy it while it's here. I hope the work of your day passes through your hands with these, okay? Have a great day. or whatever time of day you're listening to this. If it's three in the morning, have a good three in the morning. Goodbye. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit ismatu.substack.com/subscribe…
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1 revolution, then, is a faith-based practice. 21:42
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a letter to my daughter on the religion of revolution. Please lend your support to A Little Juju Podcast in their return! Juju Grant is a writer, ethnographer, show host and spiritual tower actively practicing wisdom anarchy. She so brilliantly archives African and Black Diasporatic Spiritual Traditions for free, and for the good of the people. donate here ! or via Cashapp , Venmo , or PayPal . All are available in her link tree. I do not take sponsorships so that I can shine lights on my kinfolk, who need support in the community work they do just like I do. I am so grateful for your support! You all enable me to buy groceries on a regular basis! I want to spread this love. I would love northing more than to see this fundraiser with more than what she needs. Jazz of the Episode: The Jordan River Song x Emahoy Tsege Marian Gebru Whisky Story Time x Alabaster DePlume Spring Yaounde x Wynton Marsalis Lena’s Song x The Sweet Enoughs You Go To My Head x Frank Sinatra Tenkou Why Feel Sorry x Emahoy Tsege Mariam Gebru Easy Living x Clifford Brown This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit ismatu.substack.com/subscribe…
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1 From The Vault: Advice, Three Years or so After My First Wedding 22:35
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An essay from The Vault on how miraculously pain steals language. CW: mentions of self-harm. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit ismatu.substack.com/subscribe
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The first essay of the Revolutionary Healers series. WHAT USE is "measured rationality" when to be Reasonable means to dying quietly, all the time? Notes from the text, “How to Go Mad Without Losing Your Mind.” Full transcript, with sources, at ismatu.substack.com. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit ismatu.substack.com/subscribe…
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1 a prelude: “blessed,” meaning washed with blood. 18:44
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in which ismatu delivers a free-styled, spoken essay where they realize Grief as a seed blooming their bones. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit ismatu.substack.com/subscribe
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1 Information Anarchy: The Case Against Sponsorships 47:58
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The primary goal of this essay is to argue for a healthy skepticism of sponsorship-saturated media amidst a new age in information sharing, with secondary goals as following: * to commit myself to The People and my people publicly by way of refusing to sell my word online, and * to name explicitly the ways refusing traditional sponsorship places me in a decent amount of precarity. * I’ma spoil the ending for you: I don’t want to run from precarity. Being unsteady forces me to lean on the communities that I say I value. I continually argue that refusing sponsorships as my primary mode of income forces me to expand. Now, I must trust the people for care instead of trusting them as a willing and endless site of extraction. * Plus… willing? How much can you consent to extraction anyways? Bah. I get ahead of myself. I wish to belong to The People and that means my word needs to be mine. Thank you for listening <3 This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit ismatu.substack.com/subscribe…
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Since y’all stay asking me for resource lists. The here, damn! of it all. Full list and links associated at ismatu.substack.com. happy reading!! jazz of the episode: Tony x Larry Nozero, Dennis Tini Souvenir d’Italie x Lelio Luttazzi He Knows She’s Good For You x Cyril Chambers Two For The Road x Eddie Daniels, Bucky Pizzarelli I Cover the Waterfront x Joe Pass Zen x Philippe Sarde, Toots Thielemans Message x Robohands City in the Sky x Elijah Fox This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit ismatu.substack.com/subscribe…
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In which Ismatu Gwendolyn, new to the healing profession and rooting in revolutionary thought and action, provides structure for their studies in public. As my Auntie Dequi says, “Struggle is protracted.” What we are not about to do is sit up here and study five things for five seconds. And I’m guilty of this! I constantly fight the desire to be fresh and topical and marketable. I want to be widely received and widely appreciated. Of course I do. In the past, I have moved quickly though trending topics to provide bite-sized analysis good for a short video. That’s not nearly enough time to learn and learn well. [Editor’s Note]: I will also be fr in saying, did I realize y’all were paying attention? Did I care about social media? I thought TikTok was a kids dancing app. I didn’t realize what I have the opportunity to do. I have to be what I wish to see in this world. In studying in public, I both create a new standard for myself in terms of engagement with online community, create the means for online communities to study together, and create new lenses of possibility for anyone else with desires to learn, teach, and heal in ways that don’t require us to be extractive. Revolutionary Healers: Studies in Sovereignty (ft. The Magic Expanding Syllabus) Discord: https://discord.gg/SHXhzAKr Objectives of Revolutionary Healers (Study): October 2023 through February(ish) 2024 * aids in establishing myself as a perpetual student/teacher: I am not an or the expert. I am not the authority. I have no desire to tell you what is a true, certain, fact and what is a bad, false, take. I want to study in public and show my work, in research, thought, and analysis. I want to read slowly enough for people to read alongside me and ask questions. I learn by way of learning in real public and in real time. I learn by answering questions and grappling with you all, whether I am “right” or “wrong.” I am unconcerned with universal truth, I am concerned with understanding the following: (1) what is possible? (2) what I conceive of as impossible? and (2a) who told me that I, or we, could not do that? Why? * highlights my court and company: I want to study my teachers in public as a means of providing source material. I recognize this as one of the most valuable parts of my collegiate experience, where people that I had kinship with took their access to infrastructure ( professors navigating an academic institution ) and guided me along the study of their teachers. * in studying in public, I also give us the means to talk about what we learn in community. I have created a discord for anyone that would like to talk about what I study in public. I will not be in this discord. I am not learning another social apparatus. I am creating this to fill a continually requested social need. * sets up us well for continuing studies: what we learn today builds on what we learn tomorrow and yesterday. On my platforms, we have been studying mutual aid (via Mutual Aid by Dean Spade) and care infrastructure (via The Care Manifesto by The Care Collective). We now study these ideals in action, with present and previous day examples of revolutionary caretaking. We take these lessons into account within our daily lives so that our studies sharpen and hone our actions, which become restorative and expansive enough to create the need for more study. This, in effect, is the protracted process of world-making. Preliminary Questions for Critical Analysis (1) Who wrote it? (2) For what audience? (3) For what purpose? (4) What’s missing? I ask that you consider me critically. My name is Ismatu Gwendolyn and I am committed to learning and feeling through the sticky nature of human connection— the study of love, or the lack thereof. In this world, love means liberation. I have scholastic dedication to African-American studies, global health, clinical social work and poetry, and I have academic histories and roots at Northwestern University and The University of Chicago in the United States of America (in and around Chicago, IL). I am a Sierra Leonean Black US-American personally and generationally from the mountains. I am an information anarchist and I act on that politic by learning, growing, and sharing what I learn, both on my TikTok and Instagram where I do personal + political education, and most especially here with you all, in the essays. All of this, along with my work as a mental health professional, is and will remain free of charge. As of writing this, I am 25 years old. I write for the public, for anyone that considers themselves to be of the People and for the People that grieve the current state of the world, and what it does to us. I study and document my process so that we, as a whole, can act on our grief, re-understand what is possible, and find spaces of sovereignty which might give way to peace. I conduct this series of analysis for the following reasons: * to entice us into long-form, protracted study capable of fitting into long-form, protracted struggle * to commit myself to working for my communities rather than extracting from them * to recruit aid in providing my healing work for free, which places me in precarity * this includes: monetary aid (one-time or recurring so I can pay for the expense of living), time and attention invested in study, discussion with people you are in community with (in physical person or online), action in one’s life (in physical person or online) * to prepare myself well for the life I have signed up for, as a healer engaging in revolutionary sovereignty as consistent praxis It is your job to consider what is missing from my analysis and what I choose to not share. This is how you imagine me complexly, as a human being on a stage rather than as a two-dimensional figure of entertainment that lives behind your screen. I will update this syllabus as our study roots and blooms with the appropriate links, sources, and resources. Our first essay to consider is Chapter One: MAD IS A PLACE, from How to Go Mad Without Losing Your Mind, brilliantly written by La Marr Jurelle Bruce. There is a forthcoming essay to ground our analysis within the mad work of revolution. As I write my analysis, I place them here. Make sure to join the discord for aid accessing the text. I hope the work of your day passes through your hands with ease. Stiff resistance, IG This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit ismatu.substack.com/subscribe…
sharing an old piece of creative writing because I, a mountain dweller, am stuck in the city and think of the sea. Originally written June of 2018 This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit ismatu.substack.com/subscribe
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In which we: unpack the “is she mad?” mentality, contemplate informed consent for a podcast space, and be explicit about the care infrastructure and needs of Ismatu Gwendolyn. Thanks for listening <3 Read the full transcription, annotated, at ismatu.substack.com. Jazz of the Episode: My One and Only Love x John Coltrane, Johnny Hartman Say It (Over and Over Again) x John Coltrane Quartet Manhattan x Blossom Dearie I’ll Never Smile Again x Sarah Vaughan Footsteps In The Dark x The Isley Brothers It Never Entered My Mind x Miles Davis Quintet Dark End of the Street x Aretha Franklin Spring Yaounde x Wynton Marsalis Maybe Tomorrow x Grant Green This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit ismatu.substack.com/subscribe…
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notes on refusing to charge for client services. Cited: In Pursuit of Revolutionary Love by Joy James | Oshun’s Flight Cliff notes: stop asking me to settle for manna when the opportunity for community arises. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit ismatu.substack.com/subscribe…
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