FLOODESIGN

During my graduate studies, I spent two instructional quarters staring at a 12-inch skeleton hanging from a noose over my music stand during private lessons. I inquired about the purpose of the toy skeleton and was told that it was "leftover Halloween decor." I later learned it had been up for the last eight years. I recall the relief of spring break that soon followed, during which I spent most of my days baking pies in silence, rereading Audre Lorde's essay "The Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power." Cocooned within the aroma of roasted sweet potatoes and warm nutmeg, staining my hands with blackberries and lemon juice, I cultivated a familiar quiet that led me back to myself. Here, quiet became the alchemical space where I transmuted haunting memories, personal and ancestral, into insight. Soon after, I chose to abruptly end those studies. In his still-relevant text "The Souls of Black Folk," W.E.B. Du Bois describes his experience navigating conversations with well-meaning White people: Between me and the other world, there is ever an unasked question: Unasked by some through feelings of delicacy, others through the difficulty of rightly framing it. All, nevertheless, flutter around it. They approach me in a half-hesitant sort of way, eye me curiously or compassionately, and then, instead of saying directly, How does it feel to be a problem? they say, I know an excellent colored man in my town; or... Do not these Southern outrages make your blood boil? I recall an instructor from my late teens who once revealed, with a great sense of altruistic pride, that she wished she had the opportunity to teach more Black students. When asked why, she replied in earnest that "Black people have better rhythm than anyone else!" I replied with silence, then scales, though I suspect that what she really wanted to hear was gratitude. Representation alone will never adequately address my longing to be defined outside of narratives of resistance (or submission) to White supremacy. While representation has the potential to abate some of my loneliness, it does little to address how I can define myself for myself or dissolve cultural and institutional structures that protect White innocence. It cannot hold the full complexity of and accountability to past and present, and it cannot be the only means through which we imagine — let alone live into — futures that reach beyond White standards of polite tolerance and respectability. Here, the options are QUIET OFFERS AN INTERNALLY GENERATED CONTEXT, AN ALTERNATIVE SET OF GUIDING PRINCIPLES THAT ALLEVIATES THE PRESSURE TO REACH BEYOND THE EXPECTATIONS OF WHITE SUPREMACY IN ORDER TO PROVE ONE'S INHERENT WORTH. PHOTO: KIMI MOJICA 4 | PEAKPERFS.ORG

• Cover