Dear Zeelie: A Letter in Response to A sonata to seed whatever flourishes after the end of the american empire

Dear Zeelie,

I have been imagining for some time now how I would begin this letter to you.

I have probably, admittedly, spent too much time doing that thing that writers do when trying to traverse the gap between our ideas and their external manifestation on the page. I have been taking long walks from my apartment down to the Hudson River. I have been waking up (a little too early for my personal liking) with the birds before falling back asleep and then beginning my day hours later. I’ve been trying not to be consumed by the barrage of violences—macro and micro—being committed by state actors and individuals as they are reported to me via local, national, and international sources. You are asking me to consider what might bloom in the wake of a centuries long catastrophe? I keep getting stuck in the weeds.

I realized the first time I walked through your installation at Recess in April that we had met each other almost ten years ago exactly in 2016. Then, New York City, like the rest of the country (and the world) was preparing for a presidential election, a transition of power, an assumed continuation of the liberal lull that had hovered over us for eight years. When we met, I was working at Recess, organizing with friends, meeting new comrades, en route to asserting my most true self. I remember that when I learned you were a southerner like me, I decided that it didn’t matter that we were newly acquainted—you were already not a stranger.

In the months leading up to that year’s election, there was a sense of levity floating around for many of us, until there wasn’t. Recess was located in Soho at that time, and I remember how even the most casual of visitors entered into the organization the morning after election day to process aloud their aggrievement. By April of this year, as I walked around the altars, sound works, and hand-painted fabric hangings in your space in the gallery, I realized that levity remains the last thing on anyone’s mind.

You pose a question: Have we acknowledged the chasm that lays between America, the ideal and America, the reality? Can we acknowledge that America, the scam—where you can either have a house or a job, either healthcare or food, either love or money—is beginning to fray?

I want to ask: who is your we? From my perspective, the we is the working class student trying to pay for their degree. The single parent who, in the wake of disappearing healthcare subsidies did indeed have to decide between health coverage or paying rent. The person detained at Delaney Hall being told to eat a frozen meal and be thankful for it. The Black mother who cannot be assured of her ability to give birth and live. Haven’t some of us already peeped the scam if for no other reason than it is the very thing that has been taking us out? Killing us.

I’m fascinated by the discourse that the United States has evolved into some unrecognizable, unintended shape of itself. I’m no legal or constitutional scholar, and I am not a historian. But I keep thinking about the people in my life who have done everything in a neat, orderly, and linear way and can still barely afford their living. I keep praying about my people who were wayward at times and did not get to grow old. I think to myself how foolish it ever was to believe that this was a place designed to keep them whole, when in fact, it isn’t now and never was.

Ten years ago, Donald J. Trump became president for the first time, and here we are again trying to make our way in the midst of his fascist regime. I remember how you cooked for me several times in that first year of his first administration. We talked about your music and the relationships we had with our families, about what it means to leave the places we first called home and how caretaking begins with the simple, loving invitation to eat together. We talked about recipes for making greens and textiles and herbal teas and grandmothers and I was watching, I see now, the seeds of a sonata to seed whatever flourishes after the end of the american empire being planted. Isn’t it fascinating how, sometimes, the questions we pursue as artists find us before we have a vocabulary for them?

When you asked me to write with you in this way for this project, I almost said no because truthfully, I am struggling to respond to art these days, Zeelie. And this is not some “nothing I say has value, woe is me” kind of thing. I just mean that I am wondering about the purpose of art in a moment such as ours where geriatric hatemongers play chess with our lives, you know? I look around and I think daily “what the hell am I doing?” What is art writing supposed to be doing? Gaza is being bombed. Lebanon is being bombed. Sudan is starving. Haiti remains under siege. Cuba is being choked. I know the fires of war are not here where we are, but I’d be lying to you if I said that I am not proceeding with an extreme sense of disinterest in art right now. Then I took a beat. You, I realized, were not asking me to be “the critic.” You were asking me to join you in a garden.

I began this letter by admitting to being stuck in a thicket of weeds, plant life so accustomed to being denigrated and disregarded. But weeds are medicine in the garden too, and when we pay attention to them we are also studying pathways for interdependency. I read an interview with the novelist and activist Sarah Schulman in which she laments the loss of this kind of coalition. “There’s no longer the sense of interdependency, that we create one another’s possibilities” she says [1] Gardens are sites of life and caretaking and when we steward a garden—action that is as tender as it is difficult—we declare a belief in new, material sustenance. We create possibilities.

As I consider the drawings of your installation—history paintings as I believe you’ve called them—that trace the geographic contours of your personal histories, from the sugar plantations of Louisiana to the rivers of Texas, I ask myself: what exactly does the land want me to know? Your work has extended this embodied invitation to me. It is a reminder that freedom work requires attentiveness to all the ways we humans are in collaboration with and not superior to our environments. We are in this practice together. How beautiful it is to consider how you modeled this in the very sonata you created with Yatta Zoker, Alana Coleman, Bella Malika, and Rena Anakwe as your Session closed. [2] A sonic garden that I continue to hum my way through.

What comes after the American empire? I don’t know that I can answer that question alone, as a single voice, but my inclination is to say what follows is something that looks nothing like this invention of the nation state. Something that is informed by how we keep communion with oceans and birds and trees and bees, especially the bees. Something that rejects the violence of Christian nationalism. Something that returns to the knowledges and cosmologies of our ancestors. Something that is informed by the friction of convening together, listening to one another, and then moving to the streets to agitate.

Ten years ago, it might have been tempting to soothe ourselves with the myth of democratic redemption but who can pretend in that way now? This is to say that the fight is here as my friend Ica Sadagat always emphasizes. How do we want to be sustained given this truth? We can plant the garden and we also need to be ready to defend and protect it. Keep something out. The fascists must be kept out. Maybe, in the way that a sonata consists of movement schemes, this score you have composed is the first movement in a choreography for re-making and remapping.

On a small table in the back of the gallery, you had written out a collective writing prompt for us guests: Please write down something that you need to leave behind for you to be free. Set it by the light. In order to call in something new, something else has to be released.

I wrote: lack of imagination, the nation state, and naïveté.

See you in the garden.

With love, Jessica