> a mother still, despite the roar of thorns
You're tuning into Cheers, a newsletter made by Tiffany Xie. This week: Portland protests, notes from a pandemic, and the resurrection of Emmett Till.
Hello friend,
> Thinking about Portland, about how in this Indiana suburb it is as if nobody knows this is happening in this country. How could they not know? Not know about people hauled off in unmarked vehicles, not know about Naked Athena posing in front of officers, not know about Riot Ribs serving up free meals, not know about the wall of moms using their bodies as a shield? How could you not know?
> An accompaniment to the above: the wall of moms deserves praise, but the focus on White mothers discounts the protests of Black mothers. From Tyler Harris' newsletter, Blaxsplaining:
Many have praised the “MomBloc” movement in Portland and other cities, but this type of allyship can also do harm and reinforce Whiteness. Zoe Samudzi has an amazing Twitter thread on how their protest plays on White women’s innocence and ignores the years of protest of Black mothers.
> Another accompaniment: "The president is deploying the kind of performative authoritarianism that Vladimir Putin pioneered."
> What to watch: Manual Cinema's 10th Anniversary Retrospectacular, streaming four spectacular films for free (including a play about Gwendolyn Brooks!).
> Two perspectives on pandemic life: "Diary: Insane After Coronavirus," by Patricia Lockwood, and "The New Stability," by Dr. Anna DeForest, a medical resident.
No one would ever want to be what you are now: a hazard, a threat, a frightening object on the edge of death. We try not to touch you. We construct our plans for saving you around staying as far away from you as possible.
> I'm thinking about alternative structures of success (h/t Phoebe), how instead of defining success as collecting experiences (internships, scholarships, prizes, jobs), I want to think of success as collective experiences (building community). I have lived most of my life following the former and have only recently realized that I believe more in the latter. I have five months where I don't have to appear a certain kind of productive and smart and contributive and working. I want to resist the impulse to collect experiences in this time and instead make space for play, and I want to have the patience to figure out what that means.
> Yesterday would have been Emmet Till's 79th birthday. Reads are Eve L. Ewing's "I saw Emmett Till this week at the grocery store" and Patricia Smith's "Emmett Till—Choose Your Own Adventure," which imagines a world in which Mamie Till, his mother, held a closed casket service instead.
We’re curious, but his imploded eye,
the bullet’s only door, would be the thing
we wouldn’t want to see. We justify
his childish glint, and sigh, imagining
the knotted tie, the scissored naps, those cheeks
in rakish bloom, perhaps a scrape or two
beneath his laundered shirt. The mourners’ shrieks
are tangled with an organ’s point of view,
and someone moans Mahalia. Mamie’s fanned
and comforted, her gorgeous fallen son
a horrid hidden rot. Her tiny hand
starts crushing roses—one by one by one
she wrecks the casket’s spray. It’s how she mourns—
a mother still, despite the roar of thorns.
> Snacks brought to you by Kenya (Robinson) (h/t Kimberly Drew's newsletter, Something I Saw)
Cheers,
Tiffany