Whether someone forwarded this to you or you arrived on your own steam, I’m glad you’re here. —Keisha
A few days before Christmas, I took a friend to a sponsored screening of the narrative film ORIGIN. We’d both been climbing the walls at home—care-giving, life transitions, early winter blues—and it was a good excuse to reconnect.
There’s a set of actors who all but shapeshift into the characters they play. Jeffrey Wright is one of them; Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor is another.
In 2004, when Jamie Foxx transformed himself into Ray Charles, Aunjanue played Mary Ann Fisher, a vocalist who sang with the band and inspired Charles’ song “Mary Ann.” Aunjanue donned church hats and stern glares to anchor a 2020 biopic about the Detroit gospel group the Clark Sisters (she played their mother, Dr. Mattie Moss-Clark). The following year she dodged racists and monsters opposite Courtney Vance in the HBO fantasy series Lovecraft Country.
In this year’s ORIGIN, Aunjanue adopts a completely different energy as she draws us into the life and work of Isabel Wilkerson, author of Caste: The Origins of our Discontents (2020).1
I listened to Caste in the early days of COVID but didn’t go into ORIGIN expecting the film to represent her as a character in any specific way. The film sketches Wilkerson as someone I or any of you might know: an educated Black American woman pulled between career, love, elder care, and grief… sure the easy answers aren’t quite right… yearning to question, to connect, to understand. The tenderness and curiosity in all of that is Ava DuVernay’s signature, and it’s what I expect whenever I see her name in the mix of a project like this.
DuVernay has directed and produced a long list of sweeping yet intimate films—from The Middle of Nowhere, Selma, 13th, and A Wrinkle in Time to small-screen series like When They See Us and Queen Sugar. She recently told Gayle King that she’d been advised Caste was an “un-adaptable” book.
The remark made me chuckle. Maybe whether the adaptation is a technical success or failure is the least interesting question critics and viewers could ask about it as it’s released more widely over the next few weeks.
And I hope ORIGIN is seen broadly. Not just as a festival or critical review movie. Not just by people who read or listened to Caste or who are already inclined to investigate comparative histories and ambitious sociological frameworks.
I hope it’s also seen by people who may never pick up a nearly 500-page treatise on legal and social oppression but who are willing to watch some stories about a woman, her husband, her mother, her cousin, her peers, her critics, and her work.
ORIGIN aims to catalyze anyone who realizes they have a stake in the ways our histories, laws, and social norms train us to view ourselves and treat each other, in everyday life, in extraordinary times. And I hope the film launches viewers into the library and the coffee shop, anywhere they might learn more and talk more with others.
The film’s available in select theaters January 19, which means there's still time for you to figure out which 25 of your friends and neighbors might want to go see it with you.
I’ll watch it again, too, despite a couple of discomforting, perplexing scenes that made me wonder who they were for. (Those scenes said “Not you, Keisha.”)2 And I may not write more about ORIGIN here, but I plan to chat about it as I did after the screening: with others over dinner or drinks or a long walk.
Let me know in the comments if you’ve seen it already or plan to.
Also: would you be interested in a quarterly book club this year? I’m reorganizing my my In-Progress and To Be Read stacks and am willing to share them with you.
In the meantime, here’s the trailer.
Perspectives
Internet trends with Jason Parham: How the Millennial internet fell to “fools, crooks, and private equity monsters.” (WIRED, December 2023)
Memory culture with Masha Gessen: Why face-saving national histories cultivated since World War II won’t help us build a world without genocide: “The stories we tell about history can prevent us from understanding the conditions that give rise to atrocities.” (New Yorker and The Political Scene, December 2023)
Surviving social transformation with Sara Ahmed: How finding community helps us weather the phenomenon of “[becoming] the problem for pointing out the problem… Naming violence can mean we end up being treated as the cause of it.” (The Feminist Killjoy, December 2023)
Network offering: 21-day Practice with gina Breedlove
Sound healer gina Breedlove is the author of The Vibration of Grace: Sound Healing Rituals for Liberation.
gina hosts a 21-day group practice starting January 11. Whenever she offers this, it’s an always-on-time invitation for us to reconnect with our bodies and reclaim our sovereignty.
Sign up on gina’s website! And you can get the audio version of her book at Sounds True.
New year: New shapes
As Sophie Strand writes, “Becoming new is never safe.”
It is always a breach. A break in the skin. It is a leap across the abyss. It is the moment you leap into another body.
I am a body plus. A body plus trauma, plus illness, plus pollen, plus spores, plus caretakers and friends and loved ones and wild kin.
I am interested in the material incursions that are irreversible… Here world, let me burn the bridge to my old body on my way into your body. I am ready to risk new shapes.
Some of you are already a day and a morning into 2024. For others of you, it’s just the first evening of the first day that’s slouching toward midnight.3
It’s a fun fiction that we all get a unique reset to celebrate when 11:59 p.m. on the 31st turns into 12:00 a.m. on the 1st. Of course I don’t believe that. The turning of the new year is unique only in the way that every passing second is unique.
I see humanity mid-course on themes and legacies that stretch far longer than a second, year, or any single lifetime. And the work of unraveling and rewiring those themes is too important to forget that timescale: there’s no snapping of fingers for resolution, no instantaneous fix or tidy renewal. We’re in medias res, in the middle of the action. As Lucille Clifton put it: “sailing through this to that.”4
It’s liminal and indeterminate, unfolding with every act and choice, a hot mess at the best of times and hell for perfectionists. That’s why it matters so much that we train for change—inner and outer, a little every day. Train for the unsettling, the discomfort, the conflict. Train for the uncertainty, the exploration, the relationships. Train for the work, the learning, the changing of opinions, the slow reconstruction of breached trust.
Four years ago I named this newsletter On Tomorrow’s Edge, but I could just as easily have called it Every Day. Because becoming new and risking new shapes and training for change isn’t new year’s work. It’s everyday work. Every day.
I’m still reflecting on my 2023 and preparing my heart and body for the growth I’ll need to do this year. Last year was incredible… extraordinary in some ways and straining credibility in others. I’ve grieved what needs grieving, and I’m grateful for the opportunities, the revelations, and the redirections. I’ll share more about what’s baking this year next time.
For now, I begin 2024 studying the human form and playing with animation puppets; reading on shared history and eating waffles with loved ones; learning about civic participation and tracking the themes that are going to shape the US’ next half decade.
I’m opting into spaces and groups that nourish our tenderness, our curiosity, our stubborn inquiry, that hold even our defensive distinctions from one another and that help us practice shaping relationships that are both clear and just.
And I begin with blessings from relatives and soul siblings.
For joy. For ease. For a clear sense of God and truth. For meaningful labor and peace with the effort. For health that endures. For love that makes home. For a keen sense of time.
And these are the blessings I offer to you.
Happy new year,
Keisha
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In her recent book Ordinary Notes, Christina Sharpe describes several public memorials, museum exhibits, and artistic renderings of Black trauma and death, and notes, “Every memorial and museum to atrocity already contains its own failure.” She asks pointed questions about these exhibits’ audiences and the violence they frequently inflict on Black people.
Yes, that’s a Yeats reference. I read his poem “The Second Coming” as a reminder that authoritarians get incredibly anxious about their preferred way of life breaking down. But they’re not imagining the disjuncture and it’s not obvious what’s on the other side of breakdown.
I keep coming back to Clifton’s poem, “blessing the boats.” I included it in a few transitional liturgies during the Years of Dispersion (2020-present) and I’m currently applying it to myself.