love note 11: reclaiming humanity with kae tempest
I’m late, I know. I actually thought I would get this out sooner but I’m too passionate about the artist I’m talking about, I spent too much time on this one. Plus moving is a pain, especially with weird weather and endless complications.
But hello! From Vermont! It’s beautiful here, I may never leave. Everyone is so kind, you wouldn’t believe it. My neighbors gave me a bag of farm veggies yesterday, if you wanted to, you could probably have a pleasant conversation with everyone you encounter, I was actually able to knock on my other neighbors’ door the other day to borrow a can opener. It all feels extraordinary.The sense of community here reminds me of Spain and I am all about it.
I feel like both a lot (traveling 2,500 miles cross country) and nothing (I’m just settling) has happened recently. I’m soaking it all in and enjoying a surge of creativity. I was more than happy to write this love note, thought it might be too niche, but also think everyone should know about Kae Tempest. So without further ado...
love note 11: reclaiming humanity with kae tempest
“This is my mind, get out of it, you didn’t want it,
how come you’re still hanging around in it?
This is my body, let go of it, you didn’t want it,
how come you’re still fucking controlling it?”
A shock of energy, of recognition, each time I heard these lyrics, the song on repeat, as I sulked around the streets of Phoenix. I remember it as being rainy, moody, but I know that’s a false memory. It’s just the driving beat of the song, “Grubby,” along with the imagery of an apocalyptic storm that permeates throughout the album. I’d never felt more seen as when I heard those lyrics while sweating on a summer night in the desert. I’d heard the song many times before but this time they took on a new resonance as I was at the time frustrated over being hung up over someone not worth the energy. The lack of control I felt about it was so perfectly captured in the words, and the angst of the performance mirrored my own feelings that it felt like Tempest had mined the depths of my subconscious for the song.
Grubby live performance
Kae Tempest’s work tends to do that to you, a line that hits you at your core, a familiarity and intimacy in the writing that pulls you into connection with unknown strangers and characters that then totally twists and slams you with the realities and injustices of the world, lest you get too self-involved. A constant push and pull of deeply internal conflicts that are then zoomed out to put it into perspective of how the systems are working against us and how we can only pull ourselves out of this looming doom by finding ways to help each other. This is is summed up in “Don’t Fall In,” told from the perspective of the forces of the destructive storm, here to warn humanity of its failures:
Of course, it's important to provide roof and floorboards
For you and yours and be secure in your fortunes
But you're more than the three or four you go to war for
You're part of a people that need your support
And, who's world is it if it belongs to these corporates?
The people are left on the doorstep, door shut
Nauseous and tortured by all that they've lost
This is the backbone of Tempest’s work: the constant battle between human connection and its greatest nemeses: imperialism, capitalism, racism, and the other isolating woes of modern life. You melt at the intimacy and tenderness at Tempest’s poems about love won and lost and then feel energized with anger at the injustices outlined in other works, like Europe is Lost (“Politico cash in an envelope, caught sniffing lines off a prostitutes prosthetic tits, now it's back to the House of Lords with slapped wrists...But him in a hoodie with a couple of spliffs, jail him, he’s the criminal.”)
Tempest talks about creativity, connection, and their creative journey in their newest book On Connection. They talk about how the’ve performed for so many different types of rooms, for different types of people, and the consistent “leveling” of a room, whether it was at a prison or the opening for a luxury clothing store. Creative connection where the reader, the writer, and the work are all participating to create an intimacy, no matter the medium or the occasion, has an immense power to not only foster empathy, but then, hopefully and if each of the three participants is active, propel into meaningful action.
Tunnel Vision music video
The despair at some of the truths Tempest lays out in their work, the reckoning with one’s self when we are forced to see ourselves truly in a song or a poem, is almost always counterbalanced with hope. There is a desire to unite underneath even the angriest of lines of texts. And to unite and not just forget our differences, but unite against the systems that leave certain communities vulnerable, the systems that leave us miserable in the toil and exhaustion of everyday life, unite in our common humanity and remember to fight for each other, no matter how distant, how different. Tempest has said in so many places how they are driven by their love for people. “I'll stand weeping at the train station 'cause I can see your faces. There is so much peace to be found in people's faces.”
I text one of Tempest’s poems to my good friend, Rebecca, only to have it returned with another of Tempest’s poems. Our love language. We reveled in the poems about loving women, said it was the best we’d read, said we wanted to feel a love like the one that effuses from their poems.
Tempest’s work had a huge role to play in my coming out.
I read their novel before I read anything else, The Bricks that Build the Houses, and the excitement I felt when I realized it was a queer story and felt building when I looked into Tempest’s biography was an indicator to myself about my own identity. Then when I read Running Upon the Wires, Tempest’s poetry collection that chronicles a relationship that starts at the bitter end and goes backwards to the electric beginning, all I wanted was to lay in bed reading the poems aloud to someone and let’s just say the imagined someone was telling.
How can you not hunger for the love described in the lines, “Back in the flat, we tried to make food but our love would not let us. All over that kitchen, and hours as we took ourselves deeper inside the other and few and were fed.” Or “Her mouth sets free this captive, come close to me, free me. Let me untangle the madness that knots you. I drop to my knees and crawl across you, I tell you I've got you.”
Tempest has talked openly about their struggles as a teen with their sexuality and gender. In On Connection, they talk about how they write their particular in the hopes it is universal. They write for others who feel like outsiders, for those who don’t feel understood. There is power in feeling a connection to someone so different from us that we have a newfound understanding of an experience different from our own. But let’s not also devalue the power of seeing ourselves reflected in art. Especially when we belong to an identity that has for so long been erased from history.
Unholy Elixir music video
I want to end with this. It’s something that again perfectly articulates what I’ve been vaguely thinking about, as I think about how to move through the world as it is now.
Next time I'm about to cast a harsh judgement on a stranger who offends me, can I allow myself instead to see them as the flawed and complex human that they are? Full of heartbreak, loss, ambition and disappointment, walking a volatile path of all the things they've ever failed at? What about next time I'm about to judge my nearest and dearest harshly for hurting my feelings in one way or another? Can I do the same for them? Cast them as the protagonist in their own story, rather than as an accessory to mine?
readings
poetry nook
(come on, of course I’m going to give you another Tempest poem)
Love by Kae Tempest
The way you hold your cup in a closed fist
Your wrists that get rheumatic in the rain
Your long feet, long legs and bony shoulders
Your smile a crash of teeth from nose to chin.
Your eyes drop three octaves when you want me
Your body is transposed into the key
Of sand dunes, raw quartz, heat from a slow sun.
Suddenly as graceful as when you dance
No longer smashing your limbs into
Unmoving table-tops or burning your hands
On every available hot surface
Or head-butting the car door when you dive in
You know, it used to keep me up at night,
The lack of you
Currently reading
My Meteorite by Harry Dodge I’m a big fan of Dodge’s wife, Maggie Nelson’s work and after The Argonauts, which is about their relationship, was curious about Dodge’s creative work. And here it is, a book! Still at the beginning, but it’s blending science, memoir, and philosophy so it’s up my alley
Dear Senthuran by Akwaeke Emezi Only trans memoirs lately. I loved Emezi’s Freshwater and seeing them talk candidly about their life and creative process was fascinating and enlightening. And honestly, seeing someone talk about having confidence creatively was so empowering. Just read it. Please. Let’s all stop following the cliche of the artist that doubts themself.
So. Many. Graphic. Novels. My school has a whole library of them. Here’s some I’ve really enjoyed: Big Kids by Michael DeForge, Dancing after TEN by Vivian Chong and Georgia Webber, How to They/Them by Stuart Getty
I will also tell you to read all of Tempest’s work and listen to all their music and then message me so I have someone else to talk about it with.
Lots of love to you. I’ll be back to regularly sending these out. Find me posting lots of photos of Vermont on Instagram but also share this newsletter with friends who may enjoy it so I can finally stop feeling the need to post on there.
see you soon,
k