Phone Home: Polaris Manifesto Part 8

I am a commitment to collaboration and community

Greetings! This is Part 8 in a series about myth, speculative fiction, and social change. Catch up on the rest of the series using the links below.

• Part 0: Introducing the Polaris Manifesto (article)

• Part 1: Starshine and Clay (article) (audio)

• Part 2: God is Change (article) (audio)

• Part 3: Your Fav is Woo (article) (audio)

• Part 4: Mythic Critique (article) (audio)

• Part 5: Suspend Disbelief (article + audio)

• Part 6: I Made It Up (article + audio)

• Part 7: Woo x You (article + audio)

On June 16, I’ll be giving a talk with Morbid Anatomy all about Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved and some of the mythic symbols in the novel. 

That’s my birthday week, so the best present you could give me is showing up to support. Get your tickets at tinyurl.com/belovedanatomy.

Who are your people? Who are the people in this world—or another—that feel like home to you? Whose work do you engage with that feels like a hug? Better yet, whose work have you encountered that feels like you're gazing into a mirror? This portion of the Polaris Manifesto is important because it is the foundational element of freedom struggles globally: we cannot do any of this alone.

A piece of work that I've been in conversation with since my first year of grad school is Toni Morrison's Beloved. It is a haunting and heartbreaking novel, and it's got its teeth in my soul. Without giving away too many spoilers (or potentially causing problems for my dissertation), the story highlights how critical community is to our personal wellbeing, our salvation even. In the novel, the community gathers in Grandma Baby's clearing in the forest to hear their "unchurched preacher" speak words of life over them. This same community welcomed, and then ostracized, the main character Sethe when she did the unspeakable. When Sethe is too forlorn to care for herself and her children, the community makes sure they have food despite having cast the family out of community life eighteen years prior. They later embraced her again by laying hands on her for healing and protection.

If you've been hanging around here long enough, you know I'm also head over heels for Octavia Butler. In her novel Parable of the Sower, protagonist Lauren Olamina would not have survived long enough to seed a religious intentional community that challenged state power if she set out from Robledo alone and remained that way. Safety is a relationship, not a static state of being. Word to Mariame Kaba.

All the most enduring social and religious movements have hinged on organized groups of people acting together in service of a shared vision or to achieve similar goals. Though we cannot deny the lure of a charismatic leader as a uniting force, one person does not make a movement.

I've shared previously that one of my heart's desires is to do this work with others: fostering a collective that helps people learn the importance of myth-making to social justice. I have a lot of early ideas based on my own experiences but I'm not totally sure what that looks like just yet. In fact, it's better that the vision is still gestating because it leaves my heart and mind open for what's to come, and most importantly it leaves room for other people to co-create the process.

Image Credit: Kevin Quezada on Unsplash

What You Seek Is Seeking You

This may seem like a tangent, but walk with me. The Read is a really good recent example of the sentiment, "What you seek is seeking you." Crissle and Kid Fury are some of the O.G. podcasters who have been in the game for more than a decade now. They are witty, irreverent pop culture commentators, and they do not play about Beyoncé Giselle Knowles Carter. They are on the executive board of the Beyhive, and after a decade of album reviews, viral clips, and singing Beyoncé's praises, in 2024 they finally met her. You should listen to the story in their words because it's hilarious and endearing; listening to it felt like a victory for all their fans and parasocial internet friends because we've been listening to them review, react, and stan Beyoncé's work for years. Turns out she knew about them, too, because the first thing Beyoncé said when they met was, "It's so good to finally meet y'all."

Sidebar: I adore Beyoncé, for the record. So much that I wept the very moment I heard her sing the first note of "Dangerously In Love" during the second Renaissance show in LA. I have been a fan since her solo debut when I was a preteen (shoutout to Destiny's Child), so I probably would have been blubbering and speechless right alongside Kid Fury.

This is not a sermon about how working hard and putting your head down and pulling yourself up by your bootstraps means that you will meet your own problematic fav. What I mean is that when who and what you are resonates with the right people, it will reverberate in such a way that magnetizes them to you. Yes, that is very woo, and yes, I believe it wholeheartedly. So I write my little essays and read my books and practice reciting my work aloud because I'm phoning home, trying to find the people on the same wave. The work is an antenna. That means that if any of this is having an impact on you, I would love for you to tell me. Help me find my people.

Creative Prompts

Use these prompts to pull a new world from your imagination. They’re an essential component of the Polaris Manifesto because I want you to use them as an imaginative spark to invite us into your creative vision, whether that’s through visual art, songwriting, cooking, or something else.

• Who are your people?

• How do you keep your cup full?

• Who or what helps you stay grounded in unstable times?

• If you could work with anyone in the world on the project of your dreams, who would you choose and why?

• To borrow from

  Blacks of Are.na
  , who's in your dream blunt rotation?

CEUs

Each part of the Polaris Manifesto has audio, text, and video resources for you to enjoy.

It's important to me to share other audio, text, and video resources that may help you tap into the wave of wisdom that informed this part of the Polaris Manifesto. Most of the resources are free and listed on Are.na for you to enjoy, but there is additional list of pdf and epub materials exclusively for paid subscribers below.

Note: This post contains affiliate links. If you choose to purchase books using my Bookshop affiliate links, I will receive a small commission on your purchase.

• Mariame Kaba interview on the Seizing Freedom podcast episode

• The Read, "BEYONCÉ?!" podcast episode

• Saidiya Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals book

• Toni Morrison, Beloved book

• Octavia Butler, Parable of the Sower book

• Chani Nicholas, "Processing crisis amid Mars retrograde and the Full Moon in Cancer" blog post

• Kelley J. Robinson (Human Rights Campaign) on TransLash Media podcast video clip

For paid subscribers