Tag: Kiese Laymon

Our Radical Desire for Common Good

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By Kiese Laymon, re-posted from social media.

Flags lowered for the death of the worst of white folks is pretty on-brand for this great again place. We are not in the midst of a coup, or a dictatorship. This has always been an offering under the guise of decorum. Peep the supposed left today genuflecting to a man who preached, “Black women do not have the brain processing power to otherwise be taken really seriously.”

I wish that man was not killed. “Killing’s some wack shit.” But, more than that, I wish that man considered a public and private love for the most vulnerable parts of himself and his nation before he died. I wish the same for all of us. Please do not offer your good to great gobblers of grace. They eat suffering. They eat grace. They eat good. They bust us in the heads, gleefully dismantling the few protections the vulnerable have left.

But they got heads too.

Do not let them take our radical desire for common good. Please.

Love Reckons

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An excerpt from an article Kiese Laymon wrote in 2015, reflecting on a conversation he had with his grandma “12 hours after Susie Jackson, Ethel Lance, Clementa Pinckney, Tywanza Sanders, Cynthia Hurd, Sharonda Coleman-Singleton, Depyane Middleton Doctor, Daniel Simmons and Myra Thompson were murdered in a black Charleston church by a cowardly white American thug.”

What I do know is that love reckons with the past and evil reminds us to look to the future. Evil loves tomorrow because peddling in possibility is what abusers do. At my worst, I know that I’ve wanted the people that I’ve hurt to look forward, imagining all that I can be and forgetting the contours of who I have been to them.

Like good Americans, I told Grandma, we will remember to drink ourselves drunk on the antiquated poison of progress. We will long for “shall’s” and “will be’s” and “hopes” for tomorrow. We will heavy-handedly help in our own deception and moral obliteration. We will forget how much easier it is to talk about gun control, mental illness and riots than it is to talk about the moral and material consequences of manufactured white American innocence.

Our Primary Audience

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A word for writers from Kiese Laymon, re-posted from social media.

I don’t like to give advice, whether solicited or not, but folks keep asking me about audience and I can say this. If your primary audience is a thesis committee or a tenure committee, that’s who is gonna read your book. Please don’t be mad if we don’t read you if you don’t ever write to us. Those committees can keep us employed, keep us chasing their tastes, keep us hoping, and often, keep us sad as fuck. They cannot ever be our primary audience if we want readers to give a fuck. Terrible conundrum. But.

Love Reckons with the Past

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An excerpt from Kiese Laymon’s classic 2015 essay “Black Churches Taught Us to Forgive White People. We Learned to Shame Ourselves,” published in the wake of the white supremacist mass murder at Emanuel AME in Charleston, SC

Many of us have made a life of hoping to get chosen for jobs, chosen for awards, chosen for acceptance from people, structures and corporations bred on white supremacy. We’re hoping to get chosen by people who can not see us. Knowing that they hate and terrorize us doesn’t stop us from wanting to get chosen. That’s the crazy thing. Everything about this country told Grandma, a black woman born in Central Mississippi in 1920s, to love, honor and forgive white folks. And this country still tells me, a black boy born in Mississippi in the 1970s, to titillate and tend to the emotional, psychological and spiritual needs of white people in my work.

I told my Grandma that we should have chosen ourselves. I tell her that we should have let us in. We should have held each other, and fallen in healthy love with each other, instead of watching shame make parts of us disappear.

Continue reading “Love Reckons with the Past” →