imagining Nourishment,
nourishing imagination
Letter from the Editor
Nourishment
Spring/Summer 2020
Welcome to Nourishment, the inaugural issue of Index For The Next World’s seasonal publication. This issue’s contributors comprise a group of powerful creators and voices, and I am thrilled and grateful to get to share with you these profound pieces of art, writing, and sound.
When seeding this issue, we asked: what might nourishment look like in the next world? What might it smell like, in a future-present full of thriving beings? What does it sound like, to be nourished, as an individual, a community, an ecology? How does it taste? We celebrate that there will always be multiple, context- and community-specific imaginings and practices that engage with these questions, and we’ve been lucky enough to house some beautiful ones here.
Index for the Next World (I4NW) is an online hub, where artists and change-makers share and source stories and skills that help bring to life just and thriving worlds. We feature the seasonal publication and its archive – our free-to-all Index – and a community learning platform – our subscription-based member Village - both of which help us envision and enact the wildly pleasurable worlds we need, now. Starting with the pieces in this issue, the Index is home to a growing collection of written and visual maps that embody a pleasurable and just future as if it were already here.
This first issue is about imagining nourishment, but it’s also about nourishing imagination, which is one of the central aims of I4NW. We believe that we must treat imagination as a radical and essential muscle, so that we can co-create and re-create the worlds we need for people and land.
I4NW began as a calling to look and listen to practiced re-imaginers - artists, activists, creators - when seeking alternatives to the dominant systems currently in power. This is a calling to (re)center imagination, which U.S. culture and systems shove to the sideline, treating imagination as a luxury, a hobby, a frivolity. This sidelining belies the truth: that imagination is in fact essential, critical, pragmatic, and a direct threat to the status quo.
If we accept business-as-usual as a given, it cannot be changed or challenged. But if we accept that status-quo as something imagined and implemented, it becomes re-imaginable, changeable, able to be redesigned. So we look to the artists, listen to the activists, re-orient our compass towards the generative edges and wisdom from the margins, the whispers where the river meets the trees. We’re building a home here for a seed bank of stories, an index of maps, a library of worlds. This is a place that we can look to when we need pragmatic hope. Actionable imaginings. Immersive, embodied maps to the next world.*
What a grapple, but also what an honor and a pleasure it is, to be in this moment of stretching to imagine beyond business-as-usual, together.
At the moment that I write this, the pandemic rages on, the Juneteenth anniversary of the ending of slavery fast approaches, and national and global outrage, grief, and action continue to take place in response to the brutality, violence, and murder continuously committed by United States’ police forces against Black people. Black activists and leaders are making it clear, as they have done for years, that there is an urgent need for re-imagining. Abolition requires us to imagine an “instead” in contrast to the current systems of white supremacy and racism, and then take action to make that “instead” our reality. The key narratives and declarations of the Movement For Black Lives expose how core imagination is to the project of defunding the police and creating a version of public safety where those responsible for public safety don’t keep killing Black members of the public.
These current systems of non-safety in the U.S. have been formed and limited by the white imagination in many ways, one of which I want to highlight here. A dangerous part of white privilege is the privilege to not need, to not be required to imagine something different than the way things currently are, because we’re not the ones being disproportionately killed, profiled, shot at within the status quo right now. This is particularly dangerous because, as is becoming abundantly clear, when our white imaginations shrivel and entrench, when they get tangled with our unexamined racist socializations, we start to say things like, “but if we defund the police, who will keep people from breaking into our homes and stores?” As if that is the first question, rather than, “what could it look like to have a public safety system that wasn’t killing our neighbors, friends, lovers, students, teachers, co-workers, community?” As if what we’ve got is the best version of public safety we white people can imagine. To my fellow white folks, I am here to say, our imaginations can stretch wider than that. They have to. You can imagine something better than this, more just than this, safer than this, more abundant and joyful than this.
And better yet, we can, and must, listen. Listen to and center what’s been and is being imagined, articulated, proposed, fought for, celebrated, by Black movement leaders and activists and artists, by people who have not had the option to accept and survive the system as it is, who have had to imagine something different, and who are offering visions and strategies for systems that are not only survivable, but are actually oriented towards care and thriving for all. And then let’s put our money, our time, our bodies, our joy and our work, towards those visions and strategies.
“Black Lives Matter,” as a declarative phrase, does explicitly imaginative work. It says, the system we’ve currently got is expressing and embodying an underlying story/belief that Black lives don’t matter. And the Black Lives Matter declaration and Movement demand that we build a different system, one that includes and embodies and acts out the story that Black lives do matter. This activist and visionary work of Black activists, Black re-imaginers, shows precisely how imagination functions as essential, critical, and pragmatic - it’s at the heart of uprooting white supremacy, at the heart of survival, at the heart of re-designing and implementing a just system.
We sit, stand, move in solidarity with our Black community members and leaders as they call for widespread defunding of the police. We honor the deep imaginative and strategic work they are doing, and we will continue to press for its implementation. Reform has not worked. Defund the police, re-imagine public safety, and center the imaginations, strategies, and proposals of those who have been doing this work for generations.
It’s also LGBTQIA+ Pride month, and as I reflect on the role of imagination in our past, and on lineages of abolition, it feels vital to name and honor that Pride marks the anniversary of the Stonewall Riots. These protests erupted in response to ongoing police harassment of a community of queer and trans people - many of them queer and trans people of color - who spent time socializing and dancing at the Stonewall Inn. The actions were spearheaded in large part by Marsha P. Johnson, a Black trans woman and activist. The Stonewall activists, many of them queer and trans women of color, decided to imagine a world in which queer and trans people could go out dancing safely, could be in community in public, without police presence and violence, and then they fought for that world.
Gratitude and honor to these ancestors lives as a shiver under my skin, as the sound of the music starting on the dance floor, as the vibration of all the voices declaring and demanding, against the ongoing violence towards Black trans women that continues to worsen each year, that Black trans lives matter. Black queer and trans joy matters. Queer and trans people of color’s safety matters. The safety to dance, to be in community, in public- this is one type of public safety that we continue to fight for. This Pride, I feel urgent gratitude to the lineage of Marsha P. Johnson, a lineage of resisting police violence against queer and trans people of color, of fighting so community can survive to dance together. I can feel that lineage, alive and shaking the streets. May we continue to honor and carry it forward.
I also want to celebrate and uplift all of the imagined worlds, both our own and those of others, that are helping us survive in this present, pandemic-surrounded moment. As many of us continue to experience isolation- both because of the pandemic itself and from pre-existing systemic factors- I'm reflecting that as a chronically ill person, years of surviving long periods of 'inside time' and isolation with no clear outcome or improvement in sight, has brought home to me how non-optional imagination, creation, play, and humor are to my day-to-day survival. As we often talk about at I4NW, these things matter in visioning and co-creating the future worlds we need. But they also support us to survive in the worlds and moments we find ourselves in right now. To access joy or relief for a moment under onslaught. To feel connected to the pleasure of co-creation, or of escape, of joy and play, or of traveling in imagination to those other worlds.These things can help keep us alive and nourished now, as individuals and as communities.
Honoring the vitality and importance of imaginers and imaginations past and present leads us full circle to the core questions of this issue: what might nourishment look, smell, taste, sound like, in a delicious future? In order to re-weave and enable the worlds we need, in order to have a thriving, just future, we first have to imagine those worlds we need, that just and thriving future. Speculative fiction and Black futurism have a huge influence on I4NW’s bones in this arena, and I want to honor in particular the work and writing of adrienne maree brown, whose teachings on envisioning thriving futures, and on facilitating and strategizing to bring them to life in the present, brim with not just the necessity, but also the magic, of re-imagining our realities.
My intention in founding I4NW, and in hosting and sharing the Index specifically, was to make widely available many visions and maps of thriving futures that act as if those futures were already here. That is, art, writing, creations that immerse us in their worlds, through sensory language, through our bodies. I believe that when I read one of these pieces and experience, on a body and spirit level, what it feels like to live inside of a world I long for, even for just a moment, then my body has a sensory map to that world. The art brings the world it maps into the present moment, immerses me in it, helps me feel in body and senses what it’s like to already be there. When I act from that immersive, embodied place, my actions and behaviors shift towards that world as well.
Stories, often unacknowledged ones, underlie our systems and our actions. What happens to those systems and actions when we inhabit and move from within a different, cold-water-on-a-hot-day-delicious, story? What worlds become possible then, in our hands, in the soil, in our circles? In this paradigm we’re proposing, to create a pleasurable and joyfully just world, we need pleasurable and joyfully just art.
The powerful and tender work in this issue tends to each and all of these realms. Although the pieces were collected almost entirely pre-quarantine, they speak to this moment profoundly. Themes emerge of Black joy, lineage, and imagination; of people of color seeding the future and celebrating; of collective self-determination; of comfort and rest; of mysticism and talking to the more-than-human world; of the pull between isolation and interconnectedness; of que[e]rying what kind of future or language we’ll make from the remnants and pieces in our hands; of healing our communities and our stories and our words; of the viscerally pleasurable, electric, tingling, deep, playful longing in the body for the lover that is the next world.
May these pieces of bright sky and rich earth, these weavings of words and generation[s], bring you nourishment and rest, repair, survival and thriving, celebration, and pragmatic hope. With structural and institutional violence coming to a head and being exposed and resisted in so many forms, we at I4NW are more deeply and joyfully invested than ever in imagining and practicing and creating the worlds we need. Thank you, from the bottoms of my feet in the dirt, for joining us here.
With love and gratitude,
Rachel Economy
Owner / Lead Editor-Facilitator, I4NW]
* “A Map To The Next World,” a poem by poet laureate Joy Harjo, serves as both the source of this phrase, and as a teacher and foundational text for I4NW
NOURISHMENT
ISSUE I
SPRING/SUMMER 2020