Thriving Despite, Worlds-Shifting through Corona

Photo by Luis Quintero from Pexels

We are Bluefields beach, peace, and breeze. Escoveitch tang and plantain saccharine, universe(s) expansive, Black and Light. We are from homes away from home with the sweet perfume and caramel flesh in Kingston noon-hot. We are from the suave jaunt and Demerara lilt splashing through Georgetown dusk-light. We traverse constructed borders and topographical mirages via transregional sojourns. We are Diasporic savants taught by Angelique Nixon and Rosamond King to embody the charged nature of our existence as we know the Caribbean differently, but intimately.

And we are here, situated on the land of the Quinnipiac and Nipmuc, as migrants reclaiming our birthrights to be unapologetic in our reverence of our Caribbean selves, imaginaries, and realities. For us, radical love in the time of coronavirus (corona or COVID-19) is committing to self-and-community care as critical political activism in times of dynamic dehumanization. It is a strategic response rooted in embodied and lived experiences that enables our literal and figurative border-crossing to connect with ourselves and each other across time and universes. It is an investment in learning from intergenerational knowledge granted by our predecessors that equips us to thrive, despite.

What is Radical Love in the Time of Corona?

Radical love in the time of Corona is making space for arms akimbo and mouth agape, for knee(s) bent and heartache, as we vacillate between dread, prayer, and protest, as we let go of how things were and how they should be. Radical love is creating space for relational connections to transcend barriers we didn’t know existed, until we had to focus more on being and less on doing. Radical love is the communal struggles of Black women and femmes offering care amidst crisis, state neglect, and slow death. Radical love is border-crossing with intention, sitting in our intimacy with pain, pleasure, and possibility. Radical love is holding a deep desire for meaningful life while undoing sense of self in relation to illness and death. Radical love is orienting ourselves towards the future we envision, one that is unapologetically Caribbean.

Care for Self and Community

There is bashfulness in acknowledging that corona has made caring for one’s self and community more frequent, yet more fraught with an urgency that is self-soothing, anxious, and unforgiving. The worlds around us are unfurling, and we, too, are unraveling, as we reach for and provide lifelines; treading or floating in this maelstrom of uncertainty isn’t a given. Unable to connect face-to-face, hand-in-hand, we reconfigure networks and restore ourselves through technological connections. We hold space for joy and succor, knowing that amid corona-exacerbated shitty-living, our hearts beat harder and lungs draw deeper when we hear a muffled voice, see a masked face, feel the six-feet-away presence of another, through the speaker, screen, or air. Our care for self and each other prepares us for the next unwinding. We continue to love on each other. This will be what saves us.

Border-Crossing

We have crossed the Atlantic between the U.S. and the Caribbean for research trips and visits to kinfolk and friends. This hustle and flow of Caribbean people, culture, and ideas has long shaped the creation and sustenance of Caribbean communities across space and time under the vestiges of imperial/colonial power. While corona temporarily halted the fluidity of our physical movements, what remained was the love labor that continued to cross borders and travel throughout Diasporic spaces. This love labor invokes embodied knowing that provides a template for survival by any means necessary. It is putting our lungs and lives on the line for Black freedom. It is also longing for connections among the multidimensional parts of ourselves that disrupt the divide between knowing and feeling. It is one where the personal, political, spiritual, and emotional in practice nourishes connection to self and “Other”, especially in times of prolonged isolation, precarity, and dis(ease). It is when we turn our longings into a belonging, one where our routes/roots connect and enable us to envision more expansive, livable futures.

Learning from Intergenerational Knowledge

The purpose of a thinking ooman; to read tings, to take in tings, to talk big tings with small tings, close and far tings traced back to the matrilineal line. Mama’s mama’s mama traipsed in stillness, calamity, and delicateness; all which furthered our family, our crops, our knowing, seeing, being, feeling. Glorious choruses of women before us, in their thinking moments, speaking moments, being moments, resisting moments, brilliant moments? Their tings, our moments converged for this peculiar time and space. This time and space of corona correspond in tandem. They dance in the present and the past. Oh! What would this pandemic be without the knowing, one’s instinctual sense having already been passed down as we saw done ten-score before? To thrive in such a time requires acknowledgment that time doesn’t exist; to love in such a time requires acknowledgment of boundlessness between the living and the non. Engaging with memories, ways of being, sussing out a ting, is a worthy exercise that heeds self-reflection, power, and intergenerational healing. To venerate our ancestors’ assists in savoring and securing one's sanity, alongside deep sadness, trauma, political unrest, and radical love in the time of corona. It is a very priceless ting, a very priceless ting indeed.

In the End...

We ooman, who come from ooman, who blazed forward trails on new shores, never rejecting ancestral principles. It is in the going back and getting it, the essential act of Sankofa, that we are provided with tools to circumvent the physical and invisible tremors corona insurrects and resurrects. nayyirah waheed tells us “i don't pay attention to the world ending. it has ended for me many times and began again in the morning”. An apocalyptic affirmation. It is radical love that has kept intact the souls and bonds of Caribbean peoples who have long known the effects of precarity, crises, and inequities, daily waking up to new worlds. It is this love that reminds us of the power of our collective care and mobilization through prolonged marginalization and repetitive deaths. We are envisioning, re-imagining, and living in freedom, and we do so on our own terms.