What of our writing makes us human? At a time when artifice and shortcuts threaten to devalue the creative process, we are in search of art with a pulse. We are thinking about the things that make writing a human endeavor: identifying what’s at stake for each of us, building relationality both on and off the page, and strengthening our ties to one another and the world. Process, not product. The page is, after all, a place for the radical transformation of becoming. Something we can feel. Writing relies on honesty and vulnerability, a willingness to face the abject and the unsayable, which means that it also requires risk. The institutions that insist that outsourcing our creativity to machines is inevitable are the same ones that value convenience over generative inefficiencies. But it is in this messiness, the unresolved middle, where we can create an entropy that resists mechanization.
Yet, does that same human vulnerability also keep us from writing honestly against power, perpetuating the very status quo that concerns us? Maybe the most radical act is the one that repulses the dominant forms, a contribution so ugly to the powers that be that it can’t be co-opted, gentrified, or stolen. Let us fold language upon itself, spit on it, regurgitate it, purge it so thoroughly that what’s lifted out will unrelentingly refuse containment. Let us transgress the standards of craft so that, as the Palestinian American poet and performer Fargo Nissim Tbakhi writes, we are writing “in such a way that there is no business, there is no usual.”* There is no human as usual.
For this issue, we’re looking for pieces that refuse an easy narrative, that resist the machine, that revel in their ugliness. Work that sits with discomfort over resolution, that — in the words of cultural theorists and scholars Fred Moten and Stefano Harney — taps into “something ungovernably, fugitively living in us.”** Because language, we must remember, is not only one of the main sources of power for the oppressor, but also for its resistance. We’re looking for works that draw from embodied and cultural wisdom, knowledge that can’t be cited, that live at the seam of what is deemed legitimate and what is not. Work that pulls from a deep well of oral history, folklore, and storytelling lineages. We are also interested in writing that centers the collective over the individual. Reciprocity, not extraction: collaborative pieces, works in translation, co-written poems, epistolary forms, and beyond. For the act of creation, in writing, in art, is the ultimate act of humanity.
* Tbakhi, Fargo Nissim. “Notes on Craft: Writing in the Hour of Genocide.” Protean Magazine. Dec. 8, 2023. https://proteanmag.com/2023/12/08/notes-on-craft-writing-in-the-hour-of-genocide/.
** Harney, Stefano and Moten, Fred. “Blackness and Governance.” Beyond Biopolitics: Essays on the Governance of Life and Death. Ed. by Clough, Patricia and Willse, Craig. Duke University Press, 2012, pg. 50.
This call was co-curated by Diya Abbas, Joyce Chen, Hasret Eleby, Avi Hegland-Fisher, Donnie Moreland, Chii Ọganihu, Rae Rowe, Jessica Rowshandel, and holly zhou.
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