The Circle of Mutants gathers once more
On January 20, 2025 we'll form a play-full circle of creatives, misfits, and spirited beings: empowering, elevating, co-creating, reflecting each other
The Circle of Mutants will be a playful online gathering of healers, culture workers, and change agents, taking place this time on January 20, 2025.
The House of the Edgelands (a creative collaboration between Bridget Quinn and myself that sits at the edges of the earth and the imagination) will hold space for this Circle. I realized in the last week how much I need this Circle of Mutants to occur. I haven’t heard any one else call for a convening of mutants and multidimensionals in this way so fuck it, let’s do it. (Pray for us)
It’s a deeply personal need that comes from a feeling of desire. Something is missing in my life. There is something I must do. I hope we can do together.
We’ll celebrate the transformations that brought us here and affirm our power to shift the status quo. Together we will become more intentional, more brave in our own transformation, our mutagenesis. I hope to create a collective space where we can re-collect and re-member. The Circle of Mutants will take place on the Inauguration Day of the US Empire, continuing a process that has been 8 years in the making, for me and my community, continuing processes of gathering and transforming that have many precedents.
January 20, 2025
7-8pm EST
In 2020, I released the Mutation Mixtape on the United States’ election day. The hip hop project, the last thing I’ve recorded, contains three chapters; Exposure - Build Up (tracks1-6), Origins - Storytellin' (tracks 7-13), The Mutants - Show (tracks 14-22).
The Mutation Mixtape embodies Ancestry, disability, Blackness, trauma and ceremony, manhood and much more. The Mixtape’s featured MCs include hip hop OGs such as Mic Audio (Stereo Boyz), D.S.Sense, Vital (Athletic Mic League) and many more… It’s a mixtape. It’s an anti-capitalist music process. I have no copyrights.
Mutation: that which has evolved beyond “normal” “conceptions” of “human”
We timed the release on the USA’s election day in 2020, a day which represents for many humans, corporations, and organizations, one of the most significant days in the global world order. While a mutated virus ran amok, I wanted to host an event that would embody mutation, that would call people to acknowledge and create other sources of power
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That event has its own precedents. In 2016, I was co-executive director of the East Michigan Environmental Action Council. Our Cass Corridor Commons space was a community owned space that refused the narratives that the gentrification of Detroit was beneficial or inevitable. At the time EMEAC was an eco-feminist organization that used the non profit shell to organize grassroots socialism and Afrikan Diasporic relationship building. On Election Day of that year, we hosted the “Election Day Non-Election Party.” We recognized that significant portions of our community don’t vote in imperialist elections and rather than spending that day trying to shame them we hosted a dance party (in what was the 5E hip hop gallery) in which there would be a room available in the back basement for those who wanted to follow election results. We affirmed together that our community is broader, deeper, more ancient and more funky than Democrat/Republican.
That event has its own precedents: in movements for Land Back and Native Sovereignty, in Black worker rebellions, in New Afrikan organizing, in college students who committed “class suicide” and joined the factory movement, in Water Warriors who fought against development, in elders who taught us to organize for human rights so that families could have running water in their homes, in elders who moved here from the South and planted seeds so that, seasons later, we could eat, in Grannys and Big Mamas who prayed for us, nourished our souls, and held their dignity even when we were called the worst names under the sun, and counted as less than human– three fifths on a good day- from the tongues and in the legers of the country we lived in, by the humans who built that country and maintained it.
Precedents upon precedents taught us to hold spaces that wouldn’t be defined or limited by the official stories of what– or who– was important or what– or who –had the power to determine our destiny.
I guess I have combined the what and the who in calling for the mutants to gather. What? The Mutants. Who? We Who Have Mutated.
Like I said, I need this moment on January 20th, on the United States Inauguration Day where Presidents are confirmed and the country affirms its continuity. My spirit needs a Circle of Mutants and yours might as well.
The first essay I workshopped in my MFA program was called “Super Villain.” I put it to the side and since then have focused on writing about the human aspects of life. In school, they called my dreaming on the page “hyperbole” and suggested that I write in the every day rhythms that “people” will understand and feel.
That’s cool. That’s craft. That’s formal education. We’re used to smuggling ancient destinies in English language packets. But as Kendrick Lamar shared, sometimes you got to “pop out and show n!ggaZ.” Hence the Circle convenes, so that we can reflect our brilliance to each other unfiltered.
Those who organize that other January 20th ritual don’t know that we exist. Do we even know we exist? Some of us are exhausted trying to fit in this world that defines itself as normal, human, business as usual, objective. Some of us have been mutated by a combination of pain, presence, and prayer. Some of us have creatively commodified our differences to hustle up our bill payments and need a space to just be. Some of us have had our power beaten out of us in our homes, as we work, on the streets. Some of us are escaping feelings of shame from internalizing others’ foolish responses to our differences, and we learned to apologize for making disturbances.
That power is still there, waiting for us to reclaim it.
We have been transformed by loss. And by transformed, I mean that there is new power there and here buzzing beneath the surface. I pray there is also new power between us. The energy field is already disturbed; the collective consciousness is aching and breaking. Sometimes we are labeled a disturbance when we try to put the pieces of ourselves back together publicly. Rev. Martin Luther King told trusted advisors that he feared we were integrating into a burning house. I listened to his fears, these fears he could not proclaim too loudly. The time of fawning, freezing, assimilation and contortion, sacrificing ourselves to plug into a civilization ruled by economics and brutality is quickly coming to an end, dear mutants.
The word mutant may not be the word you would use. That’s ok. This gathering may not be what you need on your journey. That’s cool. We’ll find each other. In time, we are becoming more rooted, more aligned, more radiant, more adaptive.
Alex Rodriguez and Bridget Quinn will join the Circle of Mutants, as special guest facilitators for our 90 minute session, first of this new calendar year, where we will meet each other and playfully exchange from our own journeys of mutation and transformation.
This will just be one gathering of many, a continuity, a collaboration, a collective evolution.
“Love has never been a popular movement. And no one's ever wanted, really, to be free. The world is held together, really it is held together, by the love and the passion of a very few people.
James Baldwin
