Nikia Kinli (they|them, sometimes she|her)
Re-Imagined Blackprints
Black Radical Imagination Essay Contest: SECOND PRIZE
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Remaining fixed on nourishing liberatory possibilities when so much of our time is spent swimming upstream in the vacant crevices of someone else’s suppressive imagination is arduous, yet, necessary work. And it’s this daily reminder, this inescapable truth that necessitates my ongoing commitment to harness the Black radical imagination in every pocket of my life.

Over the years, I’ve come to understand that the ritual of stretching and unleashing our radical imaginations requires deep, internal, and emotional excavation because working toward transformative social change demands embodiment. No Ashes in the Fire: Coming of Age Black and Free in America provides a powerful example of what embodying emotionality in service of individual and collective healing could look like. Page after page, Darnell L. Moore unabashedly unpacked what he called his “emotional genealogy,” charting paths to psychic relief, shamelessness, wellbeing, and reconciliation that so many of us need to bear witness to. As Black folk across genders and sexuality, we need to have access to an assortment of life-affirming models. No Ashes in the Fire provides a new possibility model* for Black being-ness that forever buries the belief that we can only survive through holding our emotions hostage, cut off from possibilities of care, love, tenderness, and wanted attention. 

Dreaming beyond what we’ve inherited and witness daily asks us to think expansively at all times, meaning we must apply as many strokes to our ever-changing canvases and confront the colorless motifs that attempt to mute our complexities and neutralize our imaginations. But struggling to center transformative social change under current socio-political conditions is like holding heavily drenched cotton balls in a way. Even when we’re working to remove all remnants of domination and exploitation from our interpersonal, social, cultural, and political landscapes we’re still absorbing thought patterns that guarantee its longevity. 

When I think about what it means to harness and unleash the Black radical imagination, many thoughts surface. I think about lifting socially imposed restrictions from the pits of our consciousness that suggest the world we live in is fixed and relatively unalterable. I think about working diligently to contribute to a new world order centered on multiplying webs of collective care, joy, and pleasure, while simultaneously navigating a world that has been structurally reinforced to maintain and reproduce systems of violence, harshness, human devastation, and catastrophic destruction. I think about large swaths of Black people working in tandem, being connective links in a robust kinship network dedicated to enacting new visions of love, intimacy, mutual support, and connection right now. I think about practicing ways of being in all my relationships that are fundamentally rooted in collective healing and liberation. I think about a type of interconnected, whole-bodied wellness that is always bound up in the wellness of all our Black kin and comrades.

Prioritizing interconnected wellness means that, like Moore, I no longer feel the need to “deal with whatever comes [my] way no matter how severe” the circumstances or situation may be. Instead, for example, I can choose to pause when my mom unintentionally says something that hurts me to the core, give myself the freedom to feel exactly what I feel without qualifiers, recognize the origin stories of my tender sites, and ultimately determine that what I need from her is to be gentler with me — language that hasn’t always escaped easily from my lips. Language she hasn’t always known how to respond to when I eventually plowed them out of my mouth. Then, because I’ve granted myself space to feel and receive the care and attention I need without reacting from a place of woundedness, I’m invited to witness the beauty of my mom’s often veiled vulnerability as she tears up, genuinely apologizes, and says with conviction, “I can do that. I can be gentler with you.” This moment, however trivial it may seem, was monumental because, as Moore noted, “I [too] really want to live without having to fight so damn hard to exist.”  No Ashes in the Fire exemplifies how we can break free and get healthy emotionally — with ourselves and with everyone else in our lives.

At work my radical imagination has helped me experiment with co-creating mini, life-affirming universes, inviting the team I support to participate in weekly resistance sessions that are solely dedicated to pleasure, play, joy, and rest. During this protected time, each person can volunteer to lead whatever exercise, activity, or game they’d like through a practice of integrated consensus. Integrated consensus moves beyond the majority vote process and into the slower-paced, how-do-we-all-get-our-needs-met-at-any-given-moment terrain. If multiple, seemingly divergent ideas are on the table, we find ways to integrate everyone’s desires into how we’ll spend our time that day. 

In my friendships, I practice elastic patience and extend the type of consensual care, affection, and attention that is generally only reserved for romantic formations and remain committed to working through conflict from a place of rigorous compassion and understanding. In my life accessing the Black radical imagination has revealed concealed openings, multiplied options available to me at any given moment, allowed me to revisit memories and tell fuller stories, released me from shame and secrecy, and better equipped me to grapple with the ways I’ve been unknowingly complicit in inhabiting dominator ideologies. 

Harnessing our Black radical imaginations forces us to rethink what’s possible, to question the (un)intended consequences of every action we take. It urges us to refuse to decouple individual realities and circumstances from collective, shared concerns impacting our people. It can also allow us to shed antiquated habits of being, ushering us into new understandings of ourselves and our Blackness, like Moore eloquently shared: 

“I had begun the process of a new becoming. I was becoming politically black…I cared less about perfecting the appearances I had been taught to perform most of my life…”

We must become instruments of release, authenticity, revelation, and resistance — an eclectic mix of reimagined blackprints.

*Note: I first heard the term “possibility model” mentioned by Laverne Cox in a 2014 interview as a replacement for role model.