what is profound desolation to some, is an urgent clearing to others.

hoping only that these intramural afropessimism debates push us deeper into "the putatively unwanted, forgotten, ignored, or ugly space out of which something else can emerge."

(word to Therí A. Pickens).

i have learnt from pan-africanists, afropessimists, carribeanists, black muslim syncretists, black feminist thinkers, third worldists, separatists, internationalists, anarchists, committed fatalists & even some peddlers of hope & policy.

nothing black is alien to me.

thinking with memoir as genealogical method, i’ve realised how so much of this intensely personalised reaction has to do with who we were when we first encountered AP, what we expected from it & what kind of community we found within it.

to many young people, afropessimism honoured the sacredness of their rage at a time when an entire class of black politicians & intellectuals were being drafted in to manage it. while their blood still decorated the streets.

that means something.

i was raised on mafioso rap & stories of desperate cousins washing up on yemeni shores. AP could never be too "nihilistic" to me.

i wanted to understand why our elders were always fleeing. why even migrant boats had hierarchies reserving the lower decks, the hole, for africans.

this was a nihilistic era. each digital lynching peppered across our screens became defanged fodder for the advancement of professional activists & inclusive hiring practices.

we need to be honest about how consistently the world lies to black youth (& what that does to them).