"I was put here to write, so I suppose that’s what I’ll continue to do."
a mini-interview with Kasai Richardson
It’s hard to say just how long I’ve been aware of Kasai Richardson on the internet. I know it began with Twitter—seeing posts that I registered as straight-up truth, sometimes making me laugh, and more than once go, Oh, shit… in that way you might when you’re like, This truth is so real it hurts.
So I’ve been aware of Kasai, and have felt some kind of long-distance fondness for making me laugh, see truth, and also, enjoy some fierce cat memes among his Instagram stories. Then I realized he had a stack, Rants Rants Revolution. And the posts I saw first were these. I mentioned them in a recommendation a few months ago, and/but they are timeless.
Analyzing race, gender, and class in America and abroad, Kasai’s essays and reviews have appeared on Salon, Vice, Good, Apogee Journal, The Root, Baltimore City Paper, and more. A Baltimore native, until recently, he was a facilitator and Communications Director for a local restorative justice nonprofit. He writes because it was what he was put here to do. He has spent the last several years working on and shopping a book about male rage and the violence it creates, and how we can prevent and repair its harms.
As is my mini-interview practice, I asked Kasai to respond to three to five questions from a total of eight offered.
Take us on a walk through a place that gives you life.
One place I truly know peace is the backyard of my parents’ home. The whole house really, but especially posted up in a patio chair on a warm spring day. It’s truly restorative. It wasn’t always the most peaceful place growing up for sure.
Their neighborhood was started in the early 20th century by Black professors as a response to the racist “No Blacks, No Jews” housing covenants of wealthy, white Baltimore neighborhoods such as Roland Park. When we moved there in 1995, the Cape Cod with peeling gray paint was overrun with scrap, greenery, and trash that my dad and I cleared out.
We each struggled growing up, in a number of ways. We’ve worked on ourselves to get to better places in our lives, through therapy, recovery, my dad finally getting his military benefits after being drafted into the Vietnam War, and my mother retiring from her federal job that was needed to provide for us but that also wore her down. Bit by bit my family has similarly worked on that house to make it more appealing and a more comfortable place to live.
The backyard transitions into a wooded area that descends into a nearby stream, and the trees let just the right amount of sunlight through. My audiophile father has set up outdoor speakers to complement the ever-present tunes in the house and on the front porch. Usually pumping old funk or R&B. I often go over there to bliss out when things feel overwhelming. As a family, we’re all in such a different place now, and the house is a different space as well. I’m grateful for the change on both fronts.
You're alone in the middle of the ocean. What are your thoughts?
When I was 7, my first year at a private school in Baltimore whose only important claim is that John Waters also attended it, I went to a class party to mark the end of the school year. An old money family with a Dutch name and claimed “we were on the Mayflower” heritage hosted us. There was a pool adjacent to the castle-like main house. I don’t remember much about my walk towards the edge of it or what was going through my mind.
I took a step into the deep end and commenced drowning, as I hadn’t learned to swim like my classmates. I distinctly remember seeing angelfish swimming around me as the life left my body at the bottom of the pool. My friend’s father, whose family owned the property, saved me after who knows how long. I was the only Black kid in the class and my dad was Mr. Mom, tending to my baby sister and unaware of what was happening until it was over. Panicked white mothers judged him in the quiet yet unsubtle way white folks often do.
For a long time I resented him for not being the one to save me, and for not being as concerned in the aftermath as I felt he should’ve been. This was where I learned the pain of feeling abandoned, but I now know he was just scared out of his mind and doing the best he could while living with his own demons.
Later in life, in adolescence in particular, I had a phase of jumping into water and expecting people to save me. The height of my pre-recovery entitlement and death wish era I guess. I similarly stepped into the deep end of a lot of dangerous situations and behaviors for years. It’s a miracle I’m still here.
Something that’s also on my mind a lot, almost to the point of wanting to write about it, is that the rate of Black folks who know how to swim is lower than that of whites. Structural factors spanning many years, such as the segregation of pools, can be blamed in large part. I’m compelled to learn soon, but it hasn’t happened just yet.
Now though, alone and surrounded by shimmering ocean, I think about the tropical fish I saw at the bottom of that pool. The same fish my father owned when he worked at a tropical fish store way back when. Angelfish, cichlids, gouramis. Thrashing about in the depths, I regret putting off learning to swim still, but accept that there’s nothing that can be done to change that.
In brief flashes, I’m thinking about how I don’t feel abandoned anymore, even if I might be doomed. I’m at peace knowing I feel more content and more loved than I did that day in 1992 and for many days after it. I can go knowing I’ve been held and seen by so many, and that I actually did some good with my second shot at this thing.
What is your dream life (at night, asleep) like?
I’m an insomniac since way back, but my issue these last several years has been staying asleep more so than falling asleep, thanks to getting sober, untangling a lot of internal mess, and ending up with a sleep apnea diagnosis. For a long time, especially before I got sober in 2012, most of my dreams were stress dreams. Missing planes or trains. Teeth disintegrating in my mouth. Being attacked by knife-wielding villains or bitten by rabid animals. Loss of loved ones.
Even as a kid, my dreams were often big, cinematic joints that I could almost always remember in complete and colorful detail upon waking. Lately the cast is often played by people I went to school with who I haven’t seen since Bush was doing lines in the White House. Extras in the little movies my brain makes when I’m knocked out.
Sometimes the dreams feel catastrophic or like a portent of sheer disaster for me and everyone I care about. In others, I have 500 billion dollars and am endlessly baby-birding cash to people from all over the world. Occasionally, I have “drunk dreams,” where I drink or use drugs in my sleep and wake up thinking I’ve relapsed. Someone once described them as postcards from my disease, and I’ve taken them less seriously since.
Recently I woke up from an otherwise mundane dream that had me laughing into the forced air of my CPAP mask because of one of its characters: A nude mountain man snuggling a beehive in a state of unadulterated ecstasy, honeycomb in hand and covered in bee stings. “God damnit Bobby’s gotten into the apiary again!” someone shouted. Another had Mariska Hargitay, television’s Olivia Benson on Law And Order: SVU, showing me her yearbook while we were seated for dinner in a crowded New York restaurant.
I think a lot about the Black-White sleep gap, and how many of us in general are walking around completely drained thanks to this system we’re clinging on to.
And part of me wants my dreams to be this generative deal that serves as a wellspring for ideas for my writing, especially the fiction-writing part of my brain that I want to jumpstart back to life. But maybe it’s not that kind of party. I know generally people grow bored when discussing each other’s dreams, but I love sharing them. It’s another layer of someone that you get to discover, even if some of it is mundane or goofy.
Who is your favorite parasocial relationship and why?
Basically all the Korean cat influencers on Instagram. My favorites right now are the Bok boys, Obok, Dabok, and Threebok (@ddo_o_da on Instagram). I have friends whose kids I’ve watched get older and grow. This is something like that. I remember when it was just Obok. Then tiny Dabok arrived. And later when Threebok came onto the scene? A cultural reset! When I die, I want to come back as a pampered British Shorthair living in a high-rise in Seoul. Heated marble floors, seaside views, and brand deals.
Truthfully, all cats are my children though. My overpriced apartment is too small to have any living thing more complex than a plant up in here with me, but I will be a cat owner again soon I’m sure. Until then, I will be having one-sided, baby talk conversations with the cats that live in my phone.
There’s of course the inevitable moment when one of my faves dies, and I, along with thousands or even millions get hit with grief as though these critters had been scurrying around our own hallways. In the case of the Bok boys, it’s like having these perfect little pets without the stress of litter boxes, vet bills, and chewed up plants. A good arrangement for where I’m at right now.
With the deterioration of certain social media platforms, I often think about what’s next for connection via the Internet. I’ve been cuttin’ up online since the free AOL disc days, and I feel myself somewhat detaching from the need to put every single thought that pops into my head online for all to see. I don’t think we were designed to be exposed to this many opinions and curated realities at once, and it shows. Who knows how much longer this show will be on the road. But at least we’ll always have the cats.
How did/does the pandemic change your creative process?
I think any thoughts I have on this extend a bit before 2020. Short version is I signed with an agent in 2017 and was over the moon. After three passes with editors and lots of waiting, rejection, and frustration, things have been stalled for a few years. I last spoke to my agent on Juneteenth of 2020. Feels like decades ago for a number of reasons, and I have to let myself laugh a little bit, because it’s been a wild ass journey so far. She shared her frustration with publishers saying that I needed more of a platform and that while I was great, this book wasn’t for them. It’s been radio silence since then.
That year taught me a lot about the publishing industry and how inequities play out regarding both pay and access for Black authors. When I signed with that agent, you couldn’t have told me shit! I assigned all of my self-worth to securing a book deal and in turn was miserable when the years whizzed by without one.
Then the pandemic hit and served as a reminder that a lot of what I thought was so damn important really wasn’t. Along with the collective grief that has become a norm since, I saw people who had what I thought I wanted still quite dissatisfied.
Not to say it isn’t still a dream, but entirely giving my serenity and sense of self over to it no longer makes sense. Mourning creative losses is important I think. It’s a weird and special kind of grief, because our work can feel like something living. The last few years have taught me a lot about the importance of failure as a means to check one’s ego, and to grow. It’s not that glamorous to put rejection and repeated failure on front street, and of course it doesn’t feel all that great.
But no one wins all the time, and luck plays such a huge role in things. It did me a lot of good to talk through these feelings with people who’ve been there these last few years. I was put here to write, so I suppose that’s what I’ll continue to do.
I’ve picked freewriting back up as a way to get unstuck creatively, though I could definitely do more to feed the creative parts of my mind. To anyone else who’s stuck or down on themselves because of gatekeeping or blown expectations, don’t stop doing the thing. But also don’t stop living, because this shit can eat us up, especially when commodification is thrown in the mix. It sucks that we gotta fight tooth and nail for our survival while we figure all this other shit out, but I truly believe a better way is possible.
What's a type of art-making that you haven't yet done that you'd like to do?
Filmmaking. It feels like one of those “where to even begin” things at the moment. But also, I feel drawn to it and have begun emailing myself notes for a story that’s been in my head for way too long.
The way I process this world’s information tends toward the visual. So I feel very drawn to film. Even as a writer, it took me a while to re-learn how to read for pleasure a few years back (Right now I’m reading A Tale For The Time Being by Ruth Ozeki and loving it!).
My favorite watches (and re-watches) lately include Titane, Shin Godzilla, The Fast and the Furious, Dolemite, Communion, Ganja & Hess, The Handmaiden, Talk To Me, Big Trouble In Little China, La Haine, and Strange Days.
I think with the strikes and with the tripling down of the some of the greediest and most short-sighted people on earth in power at these big studios, the hope is that things reconfigure in a way that both helps people get what they’re owed and that we get to witness the visions of people who typically don’t get to tell their stories.
And I know that taking the plunge myself just involves getting over myself a little and being OK with being new at something.
Subscribe to Kasai’s Substack, Rants Rants Revolution.