In consideration from my next future: What Gwendolyn Brooks taught me about tomorrow's geography

Chaun Webster is a poet, graphic designer, and parent who lives in North Minneapolis. Photo courtesy of Adjoa Akofio-Sowah

By Chaun Webster Contributor

Future Reader, 

I am writing this from my kitchen table, the chatter of three of my and my partner’s four children in the background. One of them is building a lego-house, their architectural design a thousand miles from functional, but so full of imagination and their unique creative touch.  I am writing this from my kitchen table, watching my child and wanting to feel as free to be a thousand miles from functional.  As I watch them I feel the constraint of time, I sense my own practiced subscription to its ubiquity, its bordering logic.  This so-called progressive phenomena giving rise to a compression felt in my body—sometimes as a shortness of breath, other times the cold sweat amassed from the fear of all I haven’t done.  

Time is my full inbox, the meals yet prepared, the proposals unwritten, it is the swelling in my throat at the magic I must perform each month with thin money and thick bills.  “Crisis” heightens this.  When is other than crisis?  Other than austerity?  

I am writing this from my kitchen table returning to one of my holy texts by Gwendolyn Brooks, her autobiographical, Report From Part One.   I am thinking of how Brooks, the Pulitzer prize winning poet, had her lights cut out when she found out about the award and wondering if she too felt the cold sweat of time?  In the appendix of Report From Part One, its additional matter, Brooks writes:

            My aim in my next future, is to write poems that will somehow successfully “call”…

            all black people. [1]

So succinct as to almost be hidden, Brooks tells us she is writing from one of her many futures.  That in her next future she’s got plans for the poems she intends to write. Here I read Brooks’ embrace of the plural, the multiple, with regard to time, which is to say a refusal of history as chronology, as universal. [2] With this reading there are many Gwendolyns, and many futures, other possible worlds in which they might live and write and are perhaps even living and writing.  

Octavia June, the author’s child, writes “we are a people.” Photo courtesy of the author

I am writing this from my kitchen table considering what future this might be from, how the consideration of this being written from one of my futures disturbs times supposed linearity. I am writing this wondering if in my next future, which, from one interpretation of Brooks, could have preceded this one, I will have more clarity about my own survival, about the conditions of that survival in a world predicating its impossibility. Here I think of our Lorde, her articulation of how “we were never meant to survive”, [3] that modernity itself kicks off with black disposability as a principal technology.  The question is, how to go about living in a world founded on your dispossession?  To do so is its own kind of anarchy, black living, a queer and radical thing [4].  

Brooks was writing Report From Part One from a future [5], and that, not as some far off landscape. Those futures seemed to run through her as a part of her cellular makeup. What might it mean to be from the future? Who will I “call” which is to say with whom will I be in conversation, in mutual aid? What worlds make such sociality possible? I am writing this from my kitchen table, from one future, not in response to a virus, I am writing this in consideration of what it means to be human if we should have any investment in that categorical distinction at all. I am writing this wondering if one future might spill into another into another. How in moments when it seems like the world may be ending that we might do well to remember a future when it ended before. That Aimé Césairewould suggest that that “end”, “of the world no less” is the only proper place to begin [6].  And this is not to propose doom, this is to suggest that doom is where we are, it is to propose that this current world and its logics have brought disaster and that that world cannot continue, it is a stubborn belief that other worlds are not just possible, they are here.  

I am writing this from my kitchen table and considering that this is a report also, from what part I am not sure, but somewhere in the additional matter of this future there may be instruction around the kind of being that we would consent to.  I am writing this not to convince you, reader, from whatever future this finds you in.  I am writing this as signal, as call from in and beyond the crisis.  Because in my next future, I desire a future past where I intend(ed), however impossibly, to survive.  

[1] See Report From Part One (183).

[2] See Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research And Indigenous Peoples (31)

[3] See Audre Lorde’s, The Black Unicorn (32).

[4] See Alexis Pauline Gumbs introduction to Revolutionary Mothering: Love On The Frontlines where the speak to Black women’s use of literary production between 1970 and 1990 as a way to “answer death with utopian futurity” and that to do so was “an outlawed practice, a queer thing.” (21)

[5] For more on the use of future(s) and queer temporalities see Kara Keeling’s Queer Times Black Futures.

[6] See Aimé Césaire’s Return to My Native Land (39).