An introduction to Ismatu: I am Papier-mâchéd pieces of people that love me.
Recently, a patron asked me to reintroduce myself:
Who are you exactly? What do you do? Are you in grad school? Employed? You talk a lot about your politic— how do you embody what you believe in real life?
Sitting to define myself always results in a secondhand assessment. I am asked to introduce myself and I reach for where I am from, who I am descended of, where I have lived, where my heart lives even if my current life has long since been elsewhere. I think of my mother second, despite her being the first of everything. After all, I am a daughter to begin with— and really, what a beginning that was. Me and her in that hospital, looking at each other. We, as a unit, were homeless, precarious. The simplicity of it being you and someone else, completely devoted to one another and completely out of options. She held me. My sister was away; she had to send her eldest daughter to live with her sister, because it was already very impossible to be a homeless Black woman, and now she was a homeless Black woman with a two year old, and now she was that but also with a newborn. I was named after a prayer, after herself; Gwendolyn.
First, always, I think of my sister. People ask me who I am and I think of her; I cannot help myself. In many ways she feels like an extension of myself, the better version of me. There are these gorgeous pictures of Lydia meeting me for the first time, when we were finally united, when she was two and I was two months and maybe some change. She was a little girl with draping puffy twists and a pale yellow dress covered in eyelets and so many bitty little teeth. Lydia held my rounded, freshly woven body and we belonged to each other quite easily. When I forget myself, she collects me now, even still.
I cannot think of myself without thinking of my family because I carry their names on my personhood, on my documentation, my introductions. My Aunt Nadaline, my Uncle Ismail, my Grandfather Bombolai. This is why I say my mother’s name stretched over me like a prayer; she was the only one of my namesakes that lived to see me make it to adulthood. These are the conditions of poverty: premature death. When I consider my personhood, when I think to take inventory of who or what I am, I must include death. I think of death all the time.
However. If my head is with the living, it is with Family: blood family, marriage family, chosen family. The people that do not allow any part of me to drop or drag, even when I am moving through my day like a half-baked slug. When I consider my personhood, I think of every person that I have loved that has touched me and left a mark— impressive, not in deeds or accolades but in their ability to fingerprint me permanently. I enjoy being so shaped by the humanness of others. It keeps the skin of me warm to the touch. Like a line from my favorite poem: my heart so near the surface of my skin I could have moved it with my hand. The love that makes your blood tingle in your veins. I’m that.
If I am to be succinct, I would say my name is Ismatu. I live in Chicago, though that’s changing quite rapidly. I have a social worker, a therapist, a dancer, and a writer all living in my head, giggling and clamoring together and having sleepovers every night. They’re very fucking loud so I drink a lot of tea. I am a peaceful person for the most part, though I think of death often. My back hurts from my profession. I smoke a lot of weed.
If I were to be professional (which I rarely am), I would say that I am a graduate of Northwestern University in Creative Writing and Global Health Studies, then went on for my masters at The University of Chicago for Social Work and a concentration in Global Health Administration and Policy. If you’d have asked me two years ago why I got this degree, I would have said I was procrastinating on going to medical school. If you would ask me now, I would shrug and glance off into the middle distance until we took up more pleasant and worthwhile conversation. In all honesty, I am 98.2% of the way done with my masters— all’s that’s left is one halfway done class and a final project and graduation paperwork. I’ve been sitting in paralysis— I can’t bring myself to do it. If you all knew how much strength it took for me to look at my final transcripts. I only peeked like, two nights ago. After three months of pretending they don’t exist. I was so, so certain I did not pass my spring quarter and everyone was just too kind to tell me. I am baffled that I passed. Maybe it sounds like a no brainer to everyone else, but sometimes it feels like I am the only person fully acquainted with the depths of my incapacities. I was barely making it. But I pass. I cannot believe I passed. Continuously, I am someone that hangs on by the skin of their toothy grin.
I am also made of a space, or many spaces, that engaged in the pollinated, sensual nature of mutual growth. It is deeply unsurprising I conceptualize my inside self as a garden— the mountains of Colorado are my first love, and I will not be surprised if they are my last. The way we mutually bloomed— fertile earth wrapped in sinew and hair and sky. Colorado taught me when I reach inside myself I am warm, even despite all the mountain crests, all the air. Nothing but dewy warmth. I think of us together, our lazy long days spent blooming and blooming again, all the time. I would like to speak more about being in community with a physical space.
All of these are still secondhand descriptors. It’s not lost on me. I don’t know that I am well-formed enough to speak to the substance of who or what I am. I can tell you the stuff I am made of, but the shape is still forming. I wonder if I will always consider myself this unknowable.
And finally, to the last point: I don’t personally have a distinction between myself and my politic. I cannot. My politic is alive and she will kill me. The moments that the veil of the world peels back to show the ugly decay of gold-dipped death— witnessing the ongoing underbelly of the gears that turn the world changes me fundamentally, changes me each time freshly, even if I know the disease of it all to be true without looking. I look and my stomach turns bloodthirsty.
My politic is alive and she will kill me.
However, I think the question poser might have been asking about movement work. That I am currently in a lack of. I have been run down the last two years. Where there was previously a lot of space for organizing, energy for trainings, readings, showing ups, I am now hollow. Grief has stolen many things from me, including my substance. The bite in my will. I used to be a medic. I think about death a lot. And my death, I am certain (in case you’re wondering), will be cashed in by she who lives within me, around me, before and above me, hovering there, angry all the time. I am now angry all the time and infectiously so. I want to make everyone as mad as I am. I cannot tell if that is a noble quest. Maybe burning things wouldn’t be so bad. There’s a lot to be mad about.
I can tell you what movement work I would like to be doing. I want to see mass education reading to mass radicalization. It’s why I cannot shut up about politics on the internet. I knew once I opened my mouth about politics on the internet I would never talk about anything else with a platform ever, so here I am, the same predictable bitch. I do think people are learning from me though. And, better, learning with me. It is so beautiful and vulnerable to chew new ideas and make yourself better in public view. Learning in front of an audience (of any size!) is terrifying. But it is authentic, and I (like most of us) am craving authentic words and moments on the internet, especially in an age where even our political, conscious thought is moderated to be aesthetic.
In short: I don’t know who I am. My best guess is that I am an amalgamation of people, of places, and of politics that have touched me and left a mark. I want to be as amorphous as I am allowed to be.** Thank you for asking! And welcome to my innermost self, the space I call The Garden Space. Please feel free to stay a while.
**Added from the live reading, because I got to the end of my essay and felt I needed more, so I said this off-dome:
I am an amalgamation of the people, the places, and the politics that have touched me and left a mark. All of these things— these peoples, these places, these politics— they blend into one another like watercolor. They make many different shades, on many different little pieces of paper. And all of these things (these peoples; these places; these politics; these secondhand descriptors), they take their shades and their sticky paper and they stick on me. I am formed through the sticky nature of human connection. I feel like a sculpture of papier-mâché. I am an amalgamation of the people that love me; of the places that have had stewardship over me; of the politics that have shaped and shaped and shaped me.
So then, to keep in mind with my politic, I want to share my wants and visions for this space— the garden space:
I want to learn in real time. I want to talk about the sticky nature of human connection as a phenomenon, as something I am inspired by, as a field worth studying, and especially as something I am not removed from. I am here wading through the gunk of life and it feels disingenuous to talk abstractly about how great thinkers (the hooks, the Hughes, the Brooks, the Bambaras of the world) change my thought and change my politic and change my mind but don’t change my love (or lack thereof).
Learning in real time requires sharing details about myself and my life and where I am coming from, which is in line with my belief that the personal is political.
Teaching while learning requires me to be accessible to the people I am talking to, which is why I ran to a space where you can easily write and ask me things. Comment sections are hellscapes— I love that you all can email me.
Teaching and learning are mutual practices. I don’t think of myself as some sort of preacher or professor at a metaphysical podium, spilling words unto you all. I feel as though I am talking to friends. I invite you to talk to me back as if we are friends.
I would like to keep everything exploratory and everything educational available to the public and free of charge. I want to work for the public as much as I possibly can. It helps me to still imagine online public spaces as communal and collaborative instead of strictly consumptive. I get a lot from your engagement, and your inviting your friends to view my work, and you talking about my ideas or my personhood with people you love (either in real life or online).
This is a note from The Garden Space, a newsletter and podcast that meditates on the planting and blooming of human connection. If you liked this (and I hope you did), you might consider becoming a paid member, which is really like if substack had a close friends feature, soooo. Sign up, but only if you’re nosy and can keep shit to yourself. Thank you! <3
much love,
isi
4| I am Papier-mâchéd pieces of people that love me.