A Manifesto for Speculative Relations
New work out!!!
Babes, I know it has been tough in the world.
One of the things that has given me hope, though hope is not exactly the word, perhaps it is more like purpose, conviction, is to be in dialogue—in community—with people whose work, ethics, and creativity I admire. Some of that community came in the mail over the weekend: printed copies of a new book, Five Manifestos for the Beautiful World, edited by Christina Sharpe.
Mine is one of those manifestos. I wrote a manifesto. (!!!???) I want to take a second to reflect on what it means to me that I was invited to write one, and what I hope will happen now that I have written it.
The book is part of a brilliant project led by Sharpe and Dionne Brand, who has a series at Knopf Canada called Alchemy. Two years ago, Sharpe and Brand worked together to launch a lecture series, the Alchemy Lectures, at York University, and the subsequent publication of those lectures as an edited volume by Knopf.
The model is smart in that the lectures build community and provide purpose for the gathering, while the book then continues the dialogue elsewhere (out there in the world). The first lectures (2022) and book (2023) included Dele Adeyemo, Natalie Diaz, Nadia Yala Kisukidi, and Rinaldo Walcott, and was called Borders, Human Itineraries, and All Our Relation. The book was published by Knopf in Canada first, and then the following year by Duke University Press in the US.
Last year I was one of the people Christina invited to give an Alchemy lecture, along with Saidiya Hartman, Cristina Rivera Garza, Phoebe Boswell, and Janaína Oliveira.
I remember when she sent me the email thinking: this has to be a mistake. Saidiya Hartman and Christina Rivera Garza are literal MacArthur genius grant winners. (And yeah, sure, we don’t care about those types of recognitions, but I mean, we do, actually). And Janaína and Phoebe are fucking brilliant. And I just shook my head, thinking: how can this be real.
But sometimes you get invited to do a thing and you have all the doubts, and then you just do it. You take the opportunity. And I wrote this manifesto, based in large part on the ideas I was working on for my second book (Speculative Relations: Indigenous Worlding and Repair) which will be coming out next year with Duke. I took the core idea—that we must speculate on our relations in order to bring them into being—and I turned it into a manifesto. I manifested that idea. And I think it is the most important piece of writing I have ever published.
In November of last year (2023) I went up to Toronto to give a short version of the manifesto as a lecture along with the other alchemists. We were all there and each of us had 15 minutes to speak. I was on the stage with two finalists for this year’s National Book Award—Christina Sharpe for Ordinary Notes and Cristina Rivera Garza for Liliana’s Invencible Summer (which also won the Pulitzer)—and I was in awe. But also I was in relation.
I was in relation because everyone there understood the purpose. We understood that it was in bringing our gifts to the moment, work we had been working on, ideas we had been ideating, we could find some way of joining together and bringing those forms to bear on the world—or allowing the world to inhere in the forms we have at our disposal to bear, to render, this world something more, something beautiful.
I gave my lecture. Cristina spoke about the possibilities of the subjunctive, and Phoebe about the worlds we inhabit, just, barely, and Saidiya, so cool, a searing satire of “Jane Crow” and a critique of the injuries we endure in the name of tolerance, and Janaína with her huge smile and insistence on dancing the world to life. I am not going to do it justice.
We had dinner afterward, and it was all so warm. I remember the glow of the restaurant, and Dionne hugging me, and thinking that I needed to remember the feeling—something like accomplishment, but also, care. The care of a person who knows the meaning of words. A true poet. That moment fueled my courage to complete the manifesto.
Now that the manifestos are out, I hope people read them with a sense of the warmth that contributed to their creation. I hope the joy is possible.
When we gave the lectures we did not know that Israel would continue to bomb Palestinian schools and hospitals and refugee camps for months. We did not know the death toll in Gaza would rise and rise and escape all imaginable devastation. We did not know it then, but we knew we needed to imagine this world otherwise. And that worlding, I have to believe, is the core of a manifesto. An urging to life of that which is not yet here. A speculation. A becoming.
Mine is an invitation to story ourselves in ways that allow us to be good relatives. It is an invitation to imagine what would happen if we resided in the fullness of our beings, our multiplicities, and had the possible world worlding in our presence, in our sacred bodies in relation.
I cannot say if the manifesto for speculative relations is going to change things, but I do know that I am changed by it. I know that I learned something about kindredness, joy, and care. I learned about being a good host, and being a good guest. About leaning on our connections to find what conspiratorial winks, what gestures of complicity, can bring us into the future. I learned, I mean to say, about the tender love that is required to be vulnerable in such times.
Congratulations! Looking forward to reading this.
I can't wait to read this!