Without art, we are trapped in the simple and small minds of the so-called powerful, who can only think about and for themselves. It is mostly men who take up too much space, manspreading and who talk way too much, mansplaining. But they listen long enough to take credit for a woman’s idea and to wait to be applauded—only to poorly execute it.
The move is unoriginal and uncreative. Still, it is the way of the world they have created and it is powered by the steam coming out of women’s ears. She is silently screaming, “Get me out of here!”
It’s why her speaking up is considered talking back. But there must be pushback, better still, resistance against the obvious, the foreseeable and the formulaic.
Rather than talk in circles, we need the visionary who can see straight to the point of neocolonialism, capitalism, white-body supremacy, patriarchy, militarism and fascism. If not, then you and I will be stuck between this world and the next.
Without art, my imagination would surely have been crushed. Art is the difference between life in all its fullness and complexity or death by scarcity of its truth and beauty.
I need to see life in all its angles and in every medium. I want new perspectives, reframings and retellings that include the other sides of the story.
Art is self-empowerment, a rejection of passivity, a challenge to the traditional way of being. So, show me more. Tell me more than what I’ve been hearing all my life.
I know what to expect. Instead, I want to bear witness to what is next.
Challenge what is seen and what has been said. Make me scratch my head and then tilt it. Make me question everything.
We already know what is. I am more interested in what could be. Like the French artist and “photograffeur” JR has said, “I am invested in illustrating the possible.”
Art delivered me from my fear of rejection and thus aided in my freedom of expression. It showed me how to take risks and do more than pencil pushing.
It also helped me remain grounded and true to myself. Art is resistance but also resilience. To be an artist is to bear witness.
As a writer, I use words to form better sentences in service to a better world. While it is important to call it like I see it, it is equally important to call other realities into being. Like the future-casting in African American spirituals, I can see beyond these temporary and forced realities.
The source is just behind my eyes. I rub my temples to focus this vision as “life imitates art.”
The rationale for world-making is explained plain as a new day by Anais Nin, a French-born American writer: “I could not live in any of the worlds offered to me. … the world of my parents, the world of war, the world of politics. I had to create a world of my own, like a climate, a country, an atmosphere in which I could breathe, reign, and recreate myself. … That, I believe, is the reason for every work of art.”
And that’s what makes art dangerous. “The writing is on the wall.” Still, we must create as it maintains our integrity.
James Baldwin prepared us for times like these in the fall of 1962 at New York City’s Community Church. He told his audience, “The crime of which you discover slowly you are guilty is not so much that you are aware, which is bad enough, but that other people see that you are and cannot bear to watch it, because it testifies to the fact that they are not. You’re bearing witness helplessly to something which everybody knows and nobody wants to face.”
Still, stay woke. Art is coming to save us all.
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Director of The Raceless Gospel Initiative, an associate editor, host of the Good Faith Media podcast, “The Raceless Gospel” and author of Take Me to the Water: The Raceless Gospel as Baptismal Pedagogy for a Desegregated Church.
