After a busy week, where it felt as if I didn’t get a weekend, because I didn’t as I was permaculturing and fugitivity spreading, I’m making myself comfy and cosy.
I’m all wrapped up in bed, catching up with my creativity. Catching up with myself.
And I feel so grateful for this cosy fort, for the week I’ve enjoyed, mostly on my own terms, and for the weekend to come. Rest and creative fugitivity.
I’ve still got mothering and taxiing duties this evening but I feel, in my cosy fortress, I’m on my own time/space.
I get to play and be curious and satisfy my desires. And right now all I want to do is be here. Right. Now.
I’m safe. I’m warm. I’m stealing my life back. Each cosy, comfy fort at a time.
I was reminded that I had this book in my stash while listening to Marquis Bey talk on an episode of This Is Hell!, titled ‘ To steal one’s life back: On the power of fugitive Blackness’
It made me run straight to the book and start reading it with the hope it will support my fugitivity practice as well as provide some juicy quotes for the workshop I’m facilitating with WOC Azadi Collective this Sunday about my fugitivity and visual journaling practices.
It’s all sold out but you can read about it here and get in touch if you’re interested in coming along to some other sessions in 2026.
I’ve got a chapter to write and it’s going nowhere fast.
I hate it when I think I have all the time in the world to complete a writing task and then I procrastinate.
I know I procrastinate because it’s important to me. Very important to me and I don’t want to get it wrong. So I do nothing instead.
Well not really nothing. This is my bedroom wall, where I’ve started to put up post-it notes to help me with the chapter on fugitivity.
This makes me feel as if I’m doing something. Seeing this everyday also, I hope, makes something go into my creative brain subconsciously. I’m hoping that living with it makes the wheels start turning and connections being made.
What I’m learning with fugitivity is that is’s not linear. Not a straight line from captivity to freedom, from unfreedom to freedom. It is argued that fugitivity performs freedom ‘as a constant struggle’ ( R. Slavitt cited in Davis, 2016).
This I hold close as I attempt ( struggle!) to write this chapter around fugitivity as this is not going to be a linear chapter from A to B to C etc. This chapter with its content and structure and form will be dancing with unfreedom and freedom, constantly struggling to convey meaning around fugitivity at the same time as remaining free from the academic frameworks and restricts and expectations.
In order to write about fugitivity I need to take on board fugitive methods and practices.
I’m spiralling and circling back and forth in a good way, in an honest way and hopefully the chapter will be the result.
My word of the year is LUSH. And I’ve shared about my reasoning around choosing LUSH, here. On a basic level, I just love saying the word. By the end of the year, I know those around me are going to be sick of hearing the word, LUSH. But I know I’m not going to stop saying/ using/ projecting LUSH.
LUSH needs support moving forward. LUSH needs to spread throughout my life and practice. LUSH is my mantra and I want to direct this energy into bringing about change in my life. Going with the flow at the same time as maybe directing the flow. For me it is all about energy, and for the last couple of years, my energy has been warped, abused, stagnant and awry. So 2025 is me taking it back.
LUSH is a start. And to support this feeling, I have three other words that are coming into the mix, which are coming to my aid and will be used as my guiding forces, this year and beyond, along with LUSH.
So what are these words I hear you ask?
DREAM CONJURE FUGITIVITY
For me these supporting words feed into LUSH as well as each other. They all I feel have a sense of magic and possibility about them.
TO DREAM. I think I do this daily through my visual journaling practice. Everything that comes to fruition in my life, things that I make happen for me and others, starts on the page, starts within my visual journalling. This year, I’m adding some more energy, potent energy into those pages as I intend to dream big, dream bold, dream beautiful.
TO CONJURE. This is where the magic lies. I love the word conjure. It has come to take on more meaning over the last couple of years as I’ve explored it in relation to Black Feminism, Black women and another way of knowing. Another way of being in this world which draws upon our ancestors, Mother Nature and our innate wisdom. I want to conjure with intention this year and be open to what appears, what happens. I want to step into my power as a CONJUR WOMAN ( See Romare Bearden) and appreciate all the layers.
FUGITIVITY. I have Dal Kular to thank for bringing this word into my life as well as supporting and inspiring me in the use of it too. Fugitivity is state of being and movement. It’s a way of moving through this world where you are your own authority and guide. You refuse that which has been refused. It’s a divestment from white supremacy culture, the structures and systems which state that I will never be good enough, white enough, human enough. Another life, another way of being is possible. And I’m exploring the possibilities.
I’m mighty happy with the supporting words this year I have with LUSH, because already sharing them here and thinking/ feeling on them, in the process they are already bringing about change, SLOWNESS as well as JOY.
Have you decide on your word of the year yet? Are you going to support that word with some other words? Let me know in the comments, I’m interested.
I’ve just started a new course with Lighthouse Writers Workshop called Manifestations—Reading and Writing Speculative Nonfiction! with Kanika Agrawal. It works out that it’s early morning for me at its run on mountain time. This might help my speculative imaginings but maybe not. We’ll see.
After waking late this morning, I went to the page to complete my morning pages over coffee. And this is what came out:
Good morning, good morning. ( This sentence ran into the date I’d just wrote moments before).
Wowat least I’m just doing mistakes on the page & not in real life. Do I avoid real life? I know when I’m off social media or when I shy away from the news, it is to protect me from the real world because the ‘truth’ they are peeling is direct & fake and flawed. (And hurts me. My soul.)
But it’s still facts & information & journalism & biased & not ‘for real.’ I mean we say it’s a fact about the time and the date. But ‘time’ is a construct. It was a construct to make money – colonial time. I took it as a fact but really it’s all fake or a mechanism of control. The same for ‘race’.
I was thinking it was a given but again ‘race’ is a construct. It was created to justify the exploitation & extraction & brutalisation of one group of people by another. “They can’t feel pain right so what we’re doing to them doesn’t matter”, they said. “They don’t exist on the same plain, the same level as us. So chill your boots. It’s okay. They’re not human.”
All this musing feeds into what I’ve been reading of late, especially Fugitive Feminism where Akwugo Emejulu who argues that because humanity is tied to whiteness, Black Women, who I am interested in, will never be human. So why bother? Why engage with society on their terms/ these terms hoping one day you’ll be accepted when you know that label, that status of being human will never be attained? Instead, why not speculative about alternatives, about other ways of being, other ways of knowing ( conjuring) which do not depend on being human?
What possibilities could I begin to conjure?
This is where I’m at this morning. Tired and drinking my coffee but already allowing my imaginings to run wild. To be fugitive.
After a busy and brutal period of being out in the world working for the man, I’m resting. But already just after a couple of days rest, I’m coming back to myself. Coming back to what floats my boat, and gets the creative juices flowing. Thank you.
Hey I’m just sitting here minding my own business but you still want my attention.
Still crawling up the back of me, lurking to steal my thunder and steal my power.
You don’t want me. You don’t want me near you. You don’t want me to shine.
And yet …
You can’t leave me alone. You can’t turn away because you know I’m mighty fine. You know I’m divine.
You know I hold the secrets of what it means to be fire. You know you can’t hide your desire no matter how hard you try to hide, to blend in, to mystify.
You can’t hide your desires because of your long, ugly, harsh venomous tongue dipping lies is always going to give you away, betray your cold and encrusted lying heart and mind.
I must make my heart, my queen for the love she once poured out, an ivory tower, a silent, giant, jagged-edge mountain of harsh rocks, wood and ruin.
Reaching up under a pale night sky, reaching for the stars, for some kind of spark, being witness to so much unnecessary, preventable violence, l choose to transmute fear into rage.
l choose to transmute fear into rage.
l choose to transmute fear into rage.
Do not mistake these rose-tinted cheeks as doll-like innocence or fairness. I’ve grappled with my myths and the myths you’ve fed me about my place. And passion, flames and fire have risen yet threatens to consume you more than it could ever harm me.
Burn whiteness to the ground. Burn that construction of whiteness and all that shit down to the ground once and for all. For all.
See I’m still carrying that tired old play script that a Black Woman is the mule of the world, saving everybody else when no one gives a fuck about me.
I’ll keep working on that, my queen, my heart, fixing that ivory tower to remain out of reach and impenetrable and safe.
Living Wild Studios 