Threadings. – Details, episodes & analysis

The strangest part about terminal illness is how often death comes for a peck on the lips and nothing more. A few weeks ago, I flew home to attend my mother's final affairs. Now we sit, smoothies and champagne glasses, watching a movie to spend time together. It's sunny this Tuesday. Here are reflections from Invisible Beauty on Bethann Hardison, from both me and my mother.

Jazz of the Episode:

Stepping Through The Shadow x Menahan Street Band

Tryin’ Times x Roberta Flack

Estate x Leilo Luttazzi

Slow and Easy x Speedy West

Rainy Day Lady x Menahan Street Band

Love And Peace x Quincy Jones

Read the full essay at ismatu.substack.com

a series of musings nearly entitled, “I am frightened by the way people tire of the world.”

I have had a negative amount of desire to write but Toni Morrison said it’s your job to write when evil wishes to distract you so. Here I am, I suppose. The thesis of today’s musings are that we want the fiction of a happy ending more than we want actual liberation.

Looking for a transcript, sources and links? Read the full work at ismatu.substack.com.

Selected Jazz of the Episode:

Muziqa heywete x Getatchew Mekurya

Afternoon of a Swan x Speedy West

HOW CAN WE MEND A BROKEN HEART x Kahil El’Zabar

Love and Peace x Quincy Jones

A Taste of Honey x Andy Bey, The Bey Sisters

Better Than x Lake Street Drive

Soul Serenade x Aretha Franklin

La notte muore (orchestra) x Sandro Brugnolini

Sweet Leilani x Les Paul & His Trio

a letter to my daughter on the religion of revolution.

Please lend your support to A Little Juju Podcast in their return! Juju Grant is a writer, ethnographer, show host and spiritual tower actively practicing wisdom anarchy. She so brilliantly archives African and Black Diasporatic Spiritual Traditions for free, and for the good of the people.

donate here! or via Cashapp, Venmo, or PayPal. All are available in her link tree.

I do not take sponsorships so that I can shine lights on my kinfolk, who need support in the community work they do just like I do. I am so grateful for your support! You all enable me to buy groceries on a regular basis! I want to spread this love. I would love northing more than to see this fundraiser with more than what she needs.

Jazz of the Episode:

The Jordan River Song x Emahoy Tsege Marian Gebru

Whisky Story Time x Alabaster DePlume

Spring Yaounde x Wynton Marsalis

Lena’s Song x The Sweet Enoughs

You Go To My Head x Frank Sinatra

Tenkou Why Feel Sorry x Emahoy Tsege Mariam Gebru

Easy Living x Clifford Brown

An essay from The Vault on how miraculously pain steals language. CW: mentions of self-harm.

The first essay of the Revolutionary Healers series. WHAT USE is "measured rationality" when to be Reasonable means to dying quietly, all the time? Notes from the text, “How to Go Mad Without Losing Your Mind.” Full transcript, with sources, at ismatu.substack.com.

in which ismatu delivers a free-styled, spoken essay where they realize Grief as a seed blooming their bones.

The primary goal of this essay is to argue for a healthy skepticism of sponsorship-saturated media amidst a new age in information sharing, with secondary goals as following:

* to commit myself to The People and my people publicly by way of refusing to sell my word online, and

* to name explicitly the ways refusing traditional sponsorship places me in a decent amount of precarity.

* I’ma spoil the ending for you: I don’t want to run from precarity. Being unsteady forces me to lean on the communities that I say I value. I continually argue that refusing sponsorships as my primary mode of income forces me to expand. Now, I must trust the people for care instead of trusting them as a willing and endless site of extraction.

* Plus… willing? How much can you consent to extraction anyways? Bah. I get ahead of myself.

I wish to belong to The People and that means my word needs to be mine. Thank you for listening <3

Since y’all stay asking me for resource lists. The here, damn! of it all.

Full list and links associated at ismatu.substack.com. happy reading!!

jazz of the episode:

Tony x Larry Nozero, Dennis Tini

Souvenir d’Italie x Lelio Luttazzi

He Knows She’s Good For You x Cyril Chambers

Two For The Road x Eddie Daniels, Bucky Pizzarelli

I Cover the Waterfront x Joe Pass

Zen x Philippe Sarde, Toots Thielemans

Message x Robohands

City in the Sky x Elijah Fox

In which Ismatu Gwendolyn, new to the healing profession and rooting in revolutionary thought and action, provides structure for their studies in public.

As my Auntie Dequi says, “Struggle is protracted.”

What we are not about to do is sit up here and study five things for five seconds. And I’m guilty of this! I constantly fight the desire to be fresh and topical and marketable. I want to be widely received and widely appreciated. Of course I do. In the past, I have moved quickly though trending topics to provide bite-sized analysis good for a short video. That’s not nearly enough time to learn and learn well.

[Editor’s Note]: I will also be fr in saying, did I realize y’all were paying attention? Did I care about social media? I thought TikTok was a kids dancing app. I didn’t realize what I have the opportunity to do.

I have to be what I wish to see in this world. In studying in public, I both create a new standard for myself in terms of engagement with online community, create the means for online communities to study together, and create new lenses of possibility for anyone else with desires to learn, teach, and heal in ways that don’t require us to be extractive.

Revolutionary Healers: Studies in Sovereignty (ft. The Magic Expanding Syllabus)

Discord: https://discord.gg/SHXhzAKr

Objectives of Revolutionary Healers (Study): October 2023 through February(ish) 2024

* aids in establishing myself as a perpetual student/teacher: I am not an or the expert. I am not the authority. I have no desire to tell you what is a true, certain, fact and what is a bad, false, take. I want to study in public and show my work, in research, thought, and analysis. I want to read slowly enough for people to read alongside me and ask questions. I learn by way of learning in real public and in real time. I learn by answering questions and grappling with you all, whether I am “right” or “wrong.” I am unconcerned with universal truth, I am concerned with understanding the following: (1) what is possible? (2) what I conceive of as impossible? and (2a) who told me that I, or we, could not do that? Why?

* highlights my court and company: I want to study my teachers in public as a means of providing source material. I recognize this as one of the most valuable parts of my collegiate experience, where people that I had kinship with took their access to infrastructure (professors navigating an academic institution) and guided me along the study of their teachers.

* in studying in public, I also give us the means to talk about what we learn in community. I have created a discord for anyone that would like to talk about what I study in public. I will not be in this discord. I am not learning another social apparatus. I am creating this to fill a continually requested social need.

* sets up us well for continuing studies: what we learn today builds on what we learn tomorrow and yesterday. On my platforms, we have been studying mutual aid (via Mutual Aid by Dean Spade) and care infrastructure (via The Care Manifesto by The Care Collective). We now study these ideals in action, with present and previous day examples of revolutionary caretaking. We take these lessons into account within our daily lives so that our studies sharpen and hone our actions, which become restorative and expansive enough to create the need for more study. This, in effect, is the protracted process of world-making.

Preliminary Questions for Critical Analysis

(1) Who wrote it?

(2) For what audience?

(3) For what purpose?

(4) What’s missing?

I ask that you consider me critically.

My name is Ismatu Gwendolyn and I am committed to learning and feeling through the sticky nature of human connection— the study of love, or the lack thereof. In this world, love means liberation. I have scholastic dedication to African-American studies, global health, clinical social work and poetry, and I have academic histories and roots at Northwestern University and The University of Chicago in the United States of America (in and around Chicago, IL). I am a Sierra Leonean Black US-American personally and generationally from the mountains. I am an information anarchist and I act on that politic by learning, growing, and sharing what I learn, both on my TikTok and Instagram where I do personal + political education, and most especially here with you all, in the essays. All of this, along with my work as a mental health professional, is and will remain free of charge. As of writing this, I am 25 years old.

I write for the public, for anyone that considers themselves to be of the People and for the People that grieve the current state of the world, and what it does to us. I study and document my process so that we, as a whole, can act on our grief, re-understand what is possible, and find spaces of sovereignty which might give way to peace.

I conduct this series of analysis for the following reasons:

* to entice us into long-form, protracted study capable of fitting into long-form, protracted struggle

* to commit myself to working for my communities rather than extracting from them

* to recruit aid in providing my healing work for free, which places me in precarity

* this includes: monetary aid (one-time or recurring so I can pay for the expense of living), time and attention invested in study, discussion with people you are in community with (in physical person or online), action in one’s life (in physical person or online)

* to prepare myself well for the life I have signed up for, as a healer engaging in revolutionary sovereignty as consistent praxis

It is your job to consider what is missing from my analysis and what I choose to not share. This is how you imagine me complexly, as a human being on a stage rather than as a two-dimensional figure of entertainment that lives behind your screen.

I will update this syllabus as our study roots and blooms with the appropriate links, sources, and resources.

Our first essay to consider is Chapter One: MAD IS A PLACE, from How to Go Mad Without Losing Your Mind, brilliantly written by La Marr Jurelle Bruce. There is a forthcoming essay to ground our analysis within the mad work of revolution. As I write my analysis, I place them here.

Make sure to join the discord for aid accessing the text.

I hope the work of your day passes through your hands with ease.

Stiff resistance,

IG

sharing an old piece of creative writing because I, a mountain dweller, am stuck in the city and think of the sea.

Originally written June of 2018