I’ve had times in my life where I was dismissed for my lack of subtlety—for calling too much attention to myself. For being too big. I talked too much, had too many ideas, was prone to long periods of hyper-focus on writing about talking dogs, and could not contain the constant movement in my body. I was always on. The light in my eye was incongruous with so many adults’ sense of what light my black body should emit. They seemed threatened, and I could tell, but I didn’t care. Somehow I knew it was their problem and not mine. So, I kept throwing my body recklessly against glass doors, leaning too far back in ring-around-the-rosy play, jumping too close to the edge of the bed before breaking my head open, spontaneously bursting into funky chicken dancing during library skills, engaging my 1st grade classmates in discussions about Reagan’s assassination attempt and the plight of black people, and later musing during walks home from school on my origins as an organ in my mother’s body.
With the onset of puberty, one leaky behavior was replaced with another. With puberty came body odors I couldn’t detect in myself, my long-awaited and welcomed menstrual cycle, a true best friend with the capacity and sense of safety to reciprocate, and a deep sense of self-consciousness (with shame held away at some distance, but always lurking in the shadows). I learned to reserve my talkativeness for those closest to me, for private spaces. Those spaces held me in ways that preserved my innocence, or naiveté, just enough to keep me imagining and hoping without apology.
And then there was the question posed by a mentor in 2003 or thereabout: “Are you becoming militant?” I didn’t see that question coming. I was blindsided. By simply naming who was in the room, I quickly learned that my capacity to name my identities and to see who we all were in this room together was an utter breech of white space—a white space in which I hadn’t acknowledged I was being contained. That naming and seeing was militancy. More recently, my naming threats of tokenism was deemed offensive and belligerent. Just this week, a young artist in whom I have felt invested for some time named me as part of a lineage of black artist revolution. I tried to ignore it until another colleague gave voice to its seeming incongruity with perceptions of how I move through the world in relation to activism. It makes me wonder what any of it means, and how survival, subtlety, naming, seeing, revolution and militancy shake out in the end. You sent my loud into hiding a long time ago, and when she surfaces you poise to kill her. So, she works underground, prioritizes the person-to-person relationality of encouragement and curiosity and deference. Stoking wide-eyed bigness, brightness, and revolution in others. She is doing in her work whether you can see it or not. Quiet.
