micro review of Thot by Chante Reid
reflections on Black women's innovations on craft as social process
Between Christina Sharpe (Ordinary Notes), Wendy Walters (Multiply divide) and Chanté Reid’s Thot, I’m inspired by these Black women using form creatively to make commentary on their relationship to the USA and to the act of writing itself. I can’t bring myself to write, at this moment, traditional linear memoir narratives and need these narratives to connect me to the act of writing (school writing/ mfa writing/ professional writing/ serious writing) itself which is silent/ naive/ complicit about the impact of the social process of American/ normal/ racist/ patriarchal/fascist life on our bodies/ minds/ writing/ craft.
Here we see the technique of fragmenting and revision that would make up the style and appearance of the book. This technique conveys both the intellectual act of revising/editing/ writing/thinking that Reid is engaged in and the violence of American life that interrupts her/ is part of her writing / is constituitive of her life/ keeps her in the wake (as Sharpe writes). This technique also conveys Reid wrestling with her own thoughts in contrast to what America considers to be normal and acceptable and re-writing the language to meet her own situations honestly. (Like how pro-Palestinian activists are re-writing the silences and both-sideism to call the situation there/here/ Turtle Island/globally/ Detroit/ New Afrika/
immoral and genocide.) I’m looking for a journal/ anthology/ vessel/ paid gig/ political home/ to publish a more-full review of this book (and also In the Wake by Sharpe)
Yes! And Im having fun thinking about how Said’s analysis can be applied to therapy and the spiritual marketplace.
Just popping this in here: “The intellectual today ought to be an amateur, someone who considers that to be a thinking and concerned member of a society one is entitled to raise moral issues at the heart of even the most technical and professionalized activity as it involves one's country, its power, its mode of interacting with its citizens as well as with other societies. In addition, the intellectual's spirit as an amateur can enter and transform the merely professional routine most of us go through into something much more lively and radical; instead of doing what one is supposed to do one can ask why one does it, who benefits from it, how can it reconnect with a personal project and original thoughts.
Every intellectual has an audience and a constituency. The issue is whether that audience is there to be satisfied, and hence a client to be kept happy, or whether it is there to be challenged, and hence stirred into outright opposition or mobilized into greater democratic participation in the society. But in either case, there is no getting around authority and power, and no getting around the intellectual's relationship to them. How does the intellectual address authority: as a professional supplicant or as its unrewarded, amateurish conscience?”
https://cdn.inst-fs-iad-prod.inscloudgate.net/49daf21d-c999-46ac-bbe7-c083462efdea/Said.pdf?token=eyJhbGciOiJIUzUxMiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCIsImtpZCI6ImNkbiJ9.eyJyZXNvdXJjZSI6Ii80OWRhZjIxZC1jOTk5LTQ2YWMtYmJlNy1jMDgzNDYyZWZkZWEvU2FpZC5wZGYiLCJ0ZW5hbnQiOiJjYW52YXMiLCJ1c2VyX2lkIjpudWxsLCJpYXQiOjE3MTYxODUzMzYsImV4cCI6MTcxNjI3MTczNn0.wK2S67rv1wPBPKiYiisGmvJ5hJDOdS1UOtHc-oeMdbmrxf0JgnyTaupTQrbZjE3ChAhx2st2v429UC6_zNqxyw&download=1&content_type=application%2Fpdf#:~:text=These%20I%20shall%20collect%20under,profit%20and%20selfish%2C%20narrow%20specialization.