why I write nonfiction

This is why I write nonfiction of all the things I could do with my Rusty Ole Self….

Because I lived, I live, make choices under physical social and ancestral constraints, and have feelings. They tell me that to essay is to try, to write an essay is to think (and feel) on the page in a manner that shows your unique style and a thought process that is your own… not just repeating or reflecting commonly held sentiments.

I think that making change must take place in a specific time and in a specific place amongst a specific people. And when things change, feelings arise. I lived to see what feelings can do to dynamic people committed to making change and how people can back away from feelings in order to try to make what they think of as political or social change. Or how people can exclude feelings, including even feelings of care, in order to go about the serious process of making change.

I’ve seen movements weaken and mourned this collapse, sometimes together, often alone.

And, I realize that I am old enough that the place that made me and the place that I helped to make, neither of these places exist any longer.

In our little neck of the woods, we talk often of the difference between art and propaganda. Thank you, Bridget Quinn, for numerous conversations and collaborations where we explore these distinctions for ourselves and with our people. Art touched the places where feelings live and invites the reader to ask questions of themselves and their society. Propaganda proposes answers and tells people what is happening or what they should do. I’ll leave the propaganda to others.

They say art has the capacity to reach peoples across time and space as it asks questions of humans, how we choose, how we are forced, how we are formed and what we form/create and how we bear those consequences.

My writing is often, so often, a writing of mourning- even when it’s political. I can’t speak to anyone else but as a male child of Jim Crow survivors , I was thought to keep it moving. We were taught that the act of surviving in this barbaric socio-economic system leaves no time for the act of mourning. Togetherness, yes. Yes. Mourning and making space for it together, a little trickier. There are Ancestors all around : people, places, and times.

Above all, I live and I have changed.

Above that, I have been changed. I used to think of myself as an embodiment of Detroit. Privatization, gentrification, the proliferation of nonprofits, and an assimilation into a Black Tech model of society has shaped the landscape of the Detroit beneath my feet. I walk through this city confused more often than feeling aligned with this place. Thank you Tawana Petty for sharing your struggles with this “New Detroit” as we remember the decades we’ve shared trying to make this city into a place where community can flourish.

As a man it’s taken me decades to (begin to) learn the language of feeling and an inkling of an inclination to share. I can’t let the brutality and stupidness of this moment make me abandon these bittersweet hard won gifts. If someone says it’s not strategic then I pray the strategists will sprinkle their own asé on the situation.

Analysis points us towards understanding and definitive action. It teaches us how to categorize events, people, and institutions. Some political thinkers suggest that if we just have the “correct line” we will make the “correct actions.” Some claim to study the science of society as though science was a knowledge with pure application and no feeling. Nonfiction speaks to the real feelings of confusion and upheaval that arise as one grapples with change. The reader is invited to feel with the author how the internal landscape can change just as much as the external landscapes.

The nonfiction writer such as myself struggles with their own life, wades into the pains, sees the objects and images surrounding these feelings, pulls forth inner material and, using language and culture, crafts it all for the reader into a place where we can meet. When I got sick, when my heart failed and I didn’t have the energy to front like I was an organizer with answers, I found solace in nonfiction writing. When I felt unheld by the organizations and the peoples around me, when I didn’t have the energy to leave my home to go to the meetings and the shows that I used to support, I pounded my thoughts made jagged by frustrations and isolation into essay. Nonfiction.

When gathering a crowd to clap in unison , to call and respond together in repeated language and wave your hands like you just don’t care felt insufficient and somehow inaccurate, I turned to the page and struggled over sentences and images to bend painful truth into new shapes that could hold my questions. Nonfiction.

I write from a changing place and time in hopes that the readers will gather the courage to look clearly at their own times and places, face their own feelings, and use their creativity to generate new places and times so we don’t always end up only reacting to the places and times imposed on us. In this age where so much is mediated digitally, it means so much to reclaim reconnect and realign our attention, our space, our time, our togetherness.

I became a rapper because I wanted to speak a language that the Black men around me could hear and resonate with. I remember how we were moved by the dozens and hundreds to the drum beats, arms waving in unison, together representing and affirming our individual powers of creativity. We were born of a moment in hip hop where creating your own sound was a top priority. We called ourselves creating a culture, knowing this culture to be distinct from and foundational to, and often in opposition to the commercially amplified products that people knew of as rap. It was ok if everyone didn’t know or understand our culture. We were proudly underground and did integrity as best we could.

Now, as I get older, I write this nonfiction so Black men, my niggaz, my chosen family and whoever needs it will witness this person getting older and face their own feelings and uncertainties of life that this tender process of aging brings in a place and a time that would kill me if it could. oh , god, god how many of us are living our lives in its murderous sights?

This nonfiction thing is not unrelated to the poetics, to the spoken word, to the hip hop rhythms I have known. It’s not unrelated to the vulnerability I have been searching for the words to describe, looking for the places to welcome it, and me.

This piece was written as a response in an continual conversation with Luke McGowan-Arnold about the value and the limits of writing today. He recently wrote a piece on why and how he writes fiction, especially short stories.

The revolutionaries say we can’t just fight injustices or respond to what our enemies are planning and implementing. We need our practices to create new people. Free people. Creative people.

I hope to generate courage and clarity with you in a world filled with bullshit swallowed (often silently) and manufactured lies. When we write nonfiction, all of this is what we do whenever our aim is true.