Peter Tosh’s voice was his survival. Barbed, deliberate, unflinching, it carried the weight of someone who had been left behind too many times. Long before he became reggae’s sharpest revolutionary, he was a boy navigating absence, moving between homes, learning that silence was rarely gentle.

He was born Winston Hubert McIntosh in 1944 in rural Jamaica, a place of deep green canefields and cracked red roads. His father drifted. His mother left when he was a toddler. He was passed among relatives like an object in a system that rarely allowed the privilege of stability. He was raised in Grange Hill, Westmoreland then later in Trenchtown; Kingston’s crucible of sound, poverty, and invention. It was here that he built himself.

He studied the world through vibration. He watched a man play a single wire nailed to a wall and taught himself to mimic the tones. He was tall and quiet, with a presence that could turn stillness into confrontation. Music came to him not as performance, but as instrument of reckoning. His earliest songs were sung not just in search of melody, but of identity.

By the time he met Bob Marley and Bunny Livingston in the early 1960s, Tosh had already developed a kind of internal voltage. The Wailers became the voice of a new Jamaica, one that was independent, restless, and rooted in Rastafari philosophy. But even among visionaries, Tosh was different. He didn’t aim to inspire consensus. He challenged it.

Where Marley sought uplift, Tosh dealt in precision. Where Bunny looked inward, Tosh looked directly at the state. He was the one who said what the others hesitated to. The one who wouldn't pose for politicians. He could be blunt, even difficult. But he was never false.

And then came the moment that deepened everything.

In 1973, Peter Tosh was driving with his girlfriend, Evonne, when a military jeep collided with their car. She died on impact. He survived, but barely, his skull fractured, his body torn. The government offered no investigation, no public apology, no acknowledgment. The military vehicle kept moving.

This was not just personal tragedy. It was confirmation. Tosh had already distrusted state power, but now the violence was inside his skin. The woman he loved was gone, and no one cared. No compensation. No justice. It solidified something in him, not a new anger, but a colder one.

After that, his music changed. It grew heavier, less concerned with harmony, more concerned with exposure. Songs like “Legalize It” and “Equal Rights” were not written for popularity, they were weapons. He called out Western governments, Jamaican leaders, even his own industry peers.

In 1978, he was beaten nearly to death by Jamaican police after a performance. He had spoken too freely, they said. He spent weeks in the hospital. His crime was being consistent.

What followed was a career both mythic and fragmented. He played for massive crowds in Europe and Africa. He refused to perform in South Africa during apartheid. He walked off stages when mistreated. He warned of nuclear war, corrupt leaders, false peace. And yet, many in Jamaica viewed him as too abrasive, too dangerous, too uncompromising to embrace fully.

Then, in 1987, just months after receiving a Grammy for No Nuclear War, Peter Tosh was murdered in his own home. Official reports called it a robbery. But to many, it felt like the inevitable end of a man the system could not domesticate.

To understand his rage, you have to look back, not just at the crash, but at the boy who was passed from house to house, the man who learned that love was fragile and power rarely kind. Tosh didn’t manufacture rebellion. He lived it. His anger wasn’t a performance, it was grief that had nowhere else to go.

He died refusing to edit himself. And in that, he gave us something rare: a voice that did not bow.

When I first read Beloved, I had no idea that Toni Morrison’s other great passion lay not on the page, but in the soil. I didn’t know yet that her hands, callused from countless drafts, also cradled roots and guided vines. Morrison was, by all accounts, a master gardener, and while I’d always thought of her as someone who cultivated stories, I now think of her as someone who cultivated life itself.

Her garden, like her prose, thrived on contradiction. Orderly yet wild, controlled yet bursting with unruly growth. In her Hudson River home, she propagated plants with a quiet reverence that mirrored her careful nurturing of characters.

There was a jade plant she adored, a descendant of one gifted by Nelson Mandela she’d nurse back to health again and again. To Morrison, the act of tending her plants was more than a pastime, it was a kind of dialogue, a way to coax beauty from the earth and, in turn, from herself.

I imagine Morrison in her garden as I think about her work. I see her stooping over tender green shoots, her hands stained with soil, and I can’t help but think about Sethe’s back, described in Beloved as a “chokecherry tree.” Her writing, full of these natural metaphors, remind us that bodies and landscapes are entwined, that healing is as much a part of life as breaking. Just as she watered her garden, she nurtured her characters’ pain and joy, letting their stories grow in unexpected directions.

In Morrison’s world, growth always came with effort. Dirty hands, sweat, a willingness to kneel down and begin again. “We speak, we write, and we make gardens…That is how civilizations heal.” And she knew better than most that healing wasn’t pristine. It required mess and motion. The words on the page, like the plants in her garden, needed pruning and patience. They demanded a gardener who understood not just the beauty of the bloom, but the richness of the soil that fed it.

As a writer, I’ve stared at blank pages, felt the weight of silence and coiled under the pressure of creation. And now, when I think of Toni Morrison’s hands, both on her typewriter and in her garden, I think of the courage it takes to begin, the trust it takes to nurture something unseen. Her garden wasn’t just a metaphor for her creativity; it was her other masterpiece, a living testament to the kind of labor she knew was necessary for anything meaningful to grow.

Morrison’s garden, like her novels, wasn’t about perfection. It was about faith. Faith that what she planted would eventually bear fruit, faith that even the most unruly growth could be shaped into something extraordinary. To me, this is her lasting lesson: that whether you’re writing a novel or planting a garden, you have to get your hands dirty. You have to trust in the process, the messy, beautiful process, and keep digging until the magic begins.

It wasn't the song. It wasn't the performance. Arthur Jafa paused on something smaller, something nearly invisible to most viewers. A moment where Prince, mid-set, holds a microphone, not dramatically, not performatively, but with a quiet precision that unsettled Jafa more than any lyric.

He recalls watching a performance video, not the kind that circulates in playlists of "iconic moments." Just a clip. Prince is holding a microphone. And it is in that holding, that small gesture, that Jafa locates something close to Black visual intonation. Not just a pose, but a frequency. The way the fingers curl, the rhythm of repose. The elegance of intention so saturated it becomes a style of knowing.

For Jafa, this detail is not peripheral. It is the code. The Black aesthetic, he argues, does not reside solely in narrative or representation, but in nuance, the tilt of a wrist, the geometry of posture. Where western image-making hunts for climax and conclusion, Jafa is listening to the spaces in between. He watches how a hand holds a mic the way one might hold a relic, or a threat, or a prayer.

To notice this is to understand the type of attention Jafa practices. He is not assembling images. He is tuning into them. In his world, vision is a sonic event, an act of rhythm rather than recognition. The hand becomes a metronome of tempo, a site of transmission. Prince, mid-performance, is not just delivering sound. He is holding meaning.

This mode of seeing is central to Jafa's cinematic language. In Love Is the Message, the Message Is Death, the fragments do not build a story, they build something else entirely. The edits are not transitional; they are percussive. And the images Jafa selects, a child dancing, a protest, a baptism, a beatdown, are each chosen not for impact but for resonance. They vibrate. They carry.

So when Jafa sees Prince’s hand, he is seeing technique and testimony in the same gesture. A micro-performance embedded with generations of coded resistance. A refusal to over-explain. A reminder that Black visual culture often thrives in what cannot be paraphrased.

What happens when two voices, tuned to rebellion, meet across the stature of empire? Not in harmony but in friction, in frequency. Linton Kwesi Johnson and John Cooper Clarke didn’t find friendship through similarity. They found it in the architecture of resistance, one steeped in patois and sound systems, the other in cigarette smoke and working-class wit.

This isn’t a story of musical collaboration or poetic fusion. It’s something stranger. A poet who grew his language in the vibrations of dub reggae meets a punk who recited his verses like warnings in a dive bar. One said, “Inglan is a bitch,” with the weight of colonial memory behind him. The other rasped, “The bloody pubs are shut,” as if mourning the death of something already forgotten. Different lexicons, same exhaustion.

Johnson’s poetry is militant and meticulous, sharpened by the bassline but driven by raw detail and experience. In Sonny’s Lettah, he delivers a brother’s plea, narrating a police killing with such clarity it echoes like an official report rewritten as a mourning song: “No escapin it / no runnin away fram it.”

Clarke, the punk surrealist, deals in sarcasm and bleak repetition. In Twat, he reduces the dull routines of British life into chaos, wielding absurdity like a blade. His poems are full of rot, but never empty. His anger is choreographed, a dance with cultural decay.

And still, something in the stance aligns. Both refused the polish of the literary establishment. Both wrote against erasure. They carried regionality and rebellion as sacred tasks. What bonded them wasn’t style. It was refusal. A refusal to be softened, a refusal to perform gratitude for being tolerated by the nation they dissected.

Imagine them in the same room: Clarke a tangle of limbs and sarcasm, Johnson all stillness and precision. No performance, no posturing, just a quiet understanding that sometimes, the truest kinship is forged not in likeness but in the shared decision to never look away.

There’s no neat way to categorize their connection. It doesn’t fit in the archive or on a playlist. But maybe that’s the point. A friendship existing outside of industry and inside of intent, two poets who turned language into noise, and noise into memory.

This story begins not with music, but with migration.

The kind of movement that isn’t glamorous. No backstage passes, no lights. Just the quiet reshaping of Black life across oceans. Jamaica to England. Nigeria to the British Empire. Kingston basslines colliding with London’s chill. It is within this complex web of diasporas and dislocations that the story of Sade and Bob Morgan emerges; not as celebrity gossip, but as cultural remnant.

Bob Morgan was not an icon of pop culture, yet his presence carries the weight of sound system culture, Rastafari resistance, and the Afro-Caribbean sensibility that made Jamaican music a global force. Sade, whose own origins span Nigeria and Essex, seemed to live above genre. Her voice wrapped in velvet, her presence minimal by design. But somewhere in the middle of her most intimate work, between the hush of “It’s Only Love That Gets You Through” and the devotional pulse of Lovers Rock, the Caribbean begins to speak.

Their romance is not archived in press releases. It exists in the margins. Glimpses of Morgan during her retreat from the public eye in the late '90s, the quiet birth of their child, Izaak, and the rare photographic traces that speak less of fame and more of sanctuary. Together, they formed something outside the machine of celebrity: a union shaped by interiority.

Yet this was no private retreat from the world. it was a quiet re-entry. Because to love a Jamaican man, especially one grounded in Rastafari, is to learn the language of patience, of fire without spectacle. And in Sade’s music post-Morgan, a different softness arises. Less polished, more raw. The velvet thins, and something ancient hums beneath.

Sade and Bob Morgan did not just meet. They mirrored. Not in genre, but in geography of soul. Both carried the weight of imperial legacies, of artistic lineage, of diaspora’s long ache. Both knew what it meant to create sanctuary in sound, to make of silence a home.

And in their child Izaak, a new bridge is born. Between gender, between nations, between generations of Black artists who refuse to be easily defined.

Sade’s 2000 album, Lovers Rock, feels less like a comeback and more like a communion. Released after an eight-year hiatus, much of which she spent raising Izaak and living quietly with Morgan, it pulses with intimacy, but also diaspora. The title itself pays homage to a uniquely British-Caribbean genre: Lovers Rock, born in the late '70s when Jamaican youth in South London forged their own sound, a softer derivative of roots reggae, just as political in its tenderness.

This wasn’t just Sade naming a vibe. She was invoking a lineage. While she never fully immersed herself in reggae musically, the ethos of Lovers Rock, a defiant softness in a hard world runs parallel to her own sonic philosophy. Songs like “King of Sorrow” and “It’s Only Love That Gets You Through” carry the spiritual and emotional cadence of roots reggae, not in instrumentation, but in depth. The lyrics bear testimony rather than drama. The instrumentation leans minimalist, allowing the weight of silence to speak.

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Bob Morgan’s musical contributions aren’t listed in her album credits, but influence doesn’t always announce itself in liner notes. It seeps into the room through presence, through shared philosophy, through the invisible agreements between two artists who build a life together. Rastafari, the faith Morgan follows, doesn’t often show up in Western love stories. But its teachings, oneness, natural living, the rejection of Babylonian systems mirror Sade’s lifestyle of artistic seclusion, spiritual discipline, and refusal to be consumed by the industry.

It’s tempting to view their relationship as merely romantic. But the deeper resonance lies in what it suggests about the intersections of Black love and Black sound. Jamaica and Nigeria, often separated in mainstream narratives of music history, find quiet kinship in this union. Both regions are cradles of rhythm, of improvisation, of music as a form of survival. The drum connects them: from Yoruba ritual to Nyabinghi chants, from Fela’s militant Afrobeat to Bob Marley’s meditative groove.

It is a lyric that collapses continents. That evokes not just physical migration, but spiritual return. And it positions Sade not as a passive inheritor of influence, but as a cartographer, mapping her own mythologies through sound.

What makes this story remarkable isn’t its mystery. It’s the way it reframes intimacy as a cultural impartation. Sade, born in Nigeria and raised in England, and Bob Morgan, shaped by Jamaica’s musical and spiritual traditions, built a life that crossed oceans and cultures. Together, they raised their child, Izaak, in the space between their histories. Their love didn’t need the spotlight. It became something steady and lasting, like a tradition passed down.

Sometimes the record skips. Sometimes history forgets on purpose. And when it does, these filmmakers pick up the pieces and make something else: part memory, part vision, part refusal. They aren’t chasing Hollywood. They’re building something truer. Stories that don’t ask for permission to be told.

Jenn Nkiru’s Rebirth Is Necessary (2017) is a rhythmic loop of archive and prophecy. It pulses like a mixtape, folding history, sound, and spirit into one.

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This isn’t explanation. It’s invocation.

Kahlil Joseph, in PROCESS (2017), blends home footage, dreams, and surreal vignettes. His films feel overheard, like waking up inside someone else’s memory. A new visual grammar of Black interiority. home footage, dreams, and surreal vignettes. His films feel overheard, like waking up inside someone else’s memory. A new visual grammar of Black interiority.

Ayo Akingbade's Tower XYZ (2016) and Dear Babylon (2019) trace London’s shifting landscapes through youth voices and concrete geometry. Her lens is quiet but radical—like walking through a city that’s already half erased.

Tanya Fear, in her indie short Shoot Your Shot (2020), uses minimal sci-fi and comedy to shift how we imagine love, place, and possibility. A tiny universe folded into the everyday.

Nuotama Bodomo's Afronauts (2014) reimagines Zambia’s 1960s space race through Black cosmic dreaming. Myth and history blur. It’s not just what might have happened—it’s what should have.

Jahmil X.T. Qubeka pushes genre to its edges in Sew the Winter to My Skin (2018) and Of Good Report (2013). His films are raw, ghosted, nonlinear—folk horror meets ancestral memory.

And Zina Saro-Wiwa, in Phyllis (2010), tells grief through taste, performance, and oil-soaked history. Her work isn’t just visual—it’s tactile.

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By the time Bob Marley played his first and only concert in Japan in 1979, the country was already listening. Reggae had arrived nearly a decade earlier, traveling not by ship or storm but through the grooves of vinyl and the quiet devotion of Japanese collectors. The sound was foreign, the message familiar. In Japan, a place where history still hums beneath neon, Marley’s words rang like an old bell, clear and undeniable.

I’ve walked through the backstreets of Tokyo and seen it myself, reggae is no borrowed relic here. It’s in the bars tucked between ramen stalls, in the needle-drop of a DJ spinning dubplates in a Shibuya basement, in the way a man in his sixties nods to a Wailers track like he’s greeting an old friend. Jah was not so different from Zen. The Rasta’s faith in natural order, in balance and resistance, in the inevitability of struggle and the beauty of defiance: all of it found a kindred philosophy in Bushidō, the samurai’s ancient code. Marley’s music, like the way of the warrior, was a discipline of spirit as much as sound, a training ground for the mind against the invasion of empire.

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The Dub of Discipline

Japanese audiences didn’t just hear reggae; they studied it. By the late 1970s, record shops in Tokyo and Osaka were stocking imports from Kingston, and a devoted community of selectors, DJs, and sound system builders emerged. At the heart of this movement was a quiet reverence for craftsmanship, something Japan and Jamaica shared. Just as a katana was folded and reforged to perfection, dub reggae stripped down music to its essence, cutting and reshaping sound with masterful precision.

Standing in a Yokohama sound system clash, you can feeling the bass ripple through the floor, watching the selector adjust levels like a calligrapher perfecting a brushstroke. The meditative repetition of a riddim, the deep spaces between bass notes, these aren’t just grooves; these are teachings. Reggae demanded presence. It rewarded patience. A samurai trained with a single sword stroke for years, understanding that mastery was not in the act, but in the control of breath before the swing. Reggae, with its hypnotic one-drop rhythm, carried a similar weight. It wasn’t music that chased you; it was music that waited.

Rebels and Ronin

Marley, though never one for strict doctrines, embodied the lone warrior, the rebel whose fight was both political and personal. His lyrics chronicled the struggles of the oppressed, the dignity of the poor, the inevitability of liberation. These themes resonated in Japan, a country that had its own history of displaced fighters, its own stories of loyalists turned outcasts. The samurai who found themselves masterless, ronin, had to navigate a world that no longer had a place for them.

I’ve seen that spirit linger in Japan’s reggae scene. The way a selector closes their eyes before dropping a track, as if listening for something deeper than sound. The way an elder Rasta in Osaka told me, “We overstand, not just understand,” nodding toward a truth that stretched beyond borders. Marley, a man without a nation in the traditional sense, spoke to this longing. The Wailers’ harmonies carried echoes of old battle cries, spiritual songs turned anthems of survival. The message was never just about struggle but about maintaining honor within it.

From Kingston to Tokyo

When Marley performed in Japan, he was met with an intensity of feeling that was neither fanfare nor frenzy, but something closer to ceremony. There were no riots, no frenzied mobs, only an audience locked in, absorbing every word as if it held the key to some deeper understanding.

In the decades since, reggae has not faded from Japan’s streets. If anything, it has deepened. Japanese artists have crafted their own take on the genre, from the bass-heavy sound systems of Yokohama to the quiet reverence of Kyoto’s roots reggae nights. Musicians like Rankin Taxi and Mighty Crown have carried the torch, translating reggae’s ethos into a distinctly Japanese context.

The connection between Marley’s world and the samurai’s was never about direct lineage, nor about mimicry. It was about recognition, one warrior nodding to another across time, across water, across rhythm.

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They found her body on September 11, 1999, lying in her Havana apartment with the door unlocked, a single gunshot wound to the head. No note. No explanation. Only the silence she had already carved into every figure, every print, every eye that stared from her vast, voiceless collographs.

By then, Belkis Ayón had already reimagined a gospel. Hers was pressed in ink and ash, moving through the shadows of a secret Afro-Cuban brotherhood and carried by the story of a woman who dared to speak.

Sikán. The girl who heard the voice of a fish, and was killed for repeating it.

Ayón found her in the folds of the Abakuá mythos, an all-male fraternal society descended from Calabar rites in West Africa, carried to Cuba through blood and bondage. The society had no room for women, and yet Ayón built her life inside its mythic chambers. Print by print, she opened a door she wasn’t meant to enter and walked through it barefoot, carrying a mirror and a question.

What happens when a woman trespasses into a god's silence?

The myth of Sikán reads like a parable misfiled under history: A young woman, part of the royal lineage of Efí, captures a fish, sacred and sonorous. She hears the voice of the divine inside it and makes the mistake of telling someone. For this transgression, she is executed, and the fish: Tanze, the voice of the deity becomes the foundational secret of the Abakuá society. Only men may speak of it now. Only men may carry its charge.

In Ayón's hands, Sikán returns again and again. Sometimes witness, sometimes oracle, sometimes martyr. Never entirely absent. In image after image, she appears masked, mute, but present. Her eyes, always stark white, hold the viewer’s gaze with a chilling steadiness. Her mouth? Removed like a ritual offering. A ceremony of betrayal and rebirth. Of knowing, and being punished for it.

Ayón worked primarily in collography, a technique that builds plates from textured materials, often recycled: sandpaper, lace, cardboard, glue. The prints are pulled from these assembled surfaces in thick, layered impressions. It’s a slow, physical process, one that requires abrasion, pressure, intuition. Like conjuring. Like burying and unearthing a body in the same breath.

Her palette was grayscale, deliberately so. She stripped away the seduction of color, leaving only shadow, bone, veil. The effect is timeless and placeless, as if the prints emerged from an underwater altar. Viewers often describe the images as ghostly, but that’s imprecise. The images feel unfinished by time itself, as though they are still emerging from some submerged place.

To understand Ayón is to step sideways through history. The Abakuá society, from which she drew her symbolism, traces its lineage to the Ekpe and Efik peoples of southeastern Nigeria and southwestern Cameroon. Their spiritual codes survived the transatlantic crossing, fossilized in ritual secrecy on Cuban soil. The society remained male-only, protective of its origin myths, hostile to female participation. What Ayón undertook carried the intensity of devotion and the risk of trespass.

She moved through a space she was never meant to enter. She excavated its rituals, its metaphors, its unspoken laws, and repurposed them into something neither sacred nor profane but subversive. Through Sikán, Ayón turned the myth back on itself. The story became a way of examining power, exclusion, and the costs of revelation.

The silence in Ayón’s work indicts. The absence of mouths becomes its own language; a grammar of what must be protected, or what must not be said aloud. No screams are heard here, only stillness remains, sharpened like a blade.

In life, Ayón did not seek public confrontation. But in print, she was relentless. The figures are often massive, sometimes spanning over six feet in height, requiring not just attention, but surrender. The white eyes follow. The masks stare back.

Her final exhibition opened weeks after her death. Visitors stepped into a gallery populated by silent witnesses. Sikán multiplied, transformed, defiant. The myth continued.

Some say she left no suicide note. But maybe the work was the note. Maybe the prints were the final gospel pages of an artist who had been rewriting scripture in every plate she pressed. There are no holy men in Ayón’s theology. Only a girl who heard the divine and was punished for repeating it, and an artist who made that story impossible to forget.

God, in this version, was not a bearded figure in the sky. God was a girl with no mouth, and too much knowledge. God was a question without an answer. God was a woman who told the truth.

And in Belkis Ayón’s gospel, that was enough to get her killed.

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It is said that Gayl Jones never entered a room, she simply appeared. One moment there was the hum of a literary gathering, the polite chatter of up-and-coming writers, and the next, her voice. Low, deliberate, edged with a quiet brilliance that made everyone else pause. Her words carried weight not because she sought the spotlight, but because she seemed indifferent to it. Jones was, in the literary world, a kind of apparition, so luminous on the page, so elusive in life.

And then, one day, she was gone. The disappearance was abrupt enough to generate its own folklore. Writers traded stories. Critics speculated. Years passed without public appearances. The woman whose work seemed destined for the center of the American canon had slipped beyond its view. She and her partner, Bob Higgins, had left, disappeared, escaped.

The word spread in whispers, circulating among the literati who had once marveled at her ferocity. Gayl Jones, whose debut novel, Corregidora, had detonated across the literary landscape, who had dared to tell stories no one else would touch, was now a fugitive. And with her went a love story, or maybe a tragedy, that no one could quite unravel.

Higgins was trouble. That much was known. Charismatic, erratic, always on the verge of brilliance or disaster. For years, he had orbited Jones, his volatility in sharp contrast to her tightly coiled precision. But it was this very tension, the union of the volatile and the controlled, that made them fascinating. Together, they seemed like characters out of a novel too daring to publish. And yet, whatever love bound them, whatever shared defiance kept them together, eventually became unsustainable. The whispers turned to headlines. Domestic incidents. Police reports. Then silence.

And what of Jones, the artist whose work peeled away every polite layer to expose the raw nerve beneath? Her writing had never flinched from the unspeakable. Corregidora traced generational trauma through the scalding lens of women who bore witness. Eva’s Man excavated the dark psychology of violence and survival. Jones’s fiction didn’t just break taboos, it annihilated them, reconstructing something unrelentingly honest in their place. But now, in the years when she lived on the run, her life began to echo those stories in ways that made her admirers uncomfortable. She had become too close to her characters, too enmeshed in the chaos she once wrote about.

Still, her absence did not diminish her myth. Among those who understood what her books had done, what they had given us, her name only grew more luminous in exile. She was mentioned in hushed tones in university hallways, her novels dissected at conferences by critics who never expected to see her in the audience. And yet, through it all, the question remained: What happens when a literary genius steps off the page and into a life as turbulent as her prose?

Jones’s story, like her work, resists resolution. There are no clean endings here, no tidy conclusions. What we have are her novels, jagged and brilliant, and the knowledge that somewhere, behind those words, was a woman who lived fiercely, who loved recklessly, who disappeared. A woman who might never step into the room again, but whose voice is still impossible to ignore.

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Music is something I’ve always felt in the body first, like weather moving in. A pressure drop. A warm front. And there are certain artists who don’t just release songs, they shift the air. Chronixx is one of them.

His music doesn’t arrive on cue; it unfolds, like a season. Some call it delay. I call it discipline. Because music, true music, isn’t made in haste. It moves like cultivation. It requires tending, patience, and the kind of listening that comes from living close to nature. As a musician, I know this rhythm. I’ve felt it in my bones. The pause before the bloom. The ache of waiting for something ripe.

Reggae, too, is a farmer’s form. Rooted in repetition, but not in redundancy, in ritual. The one-drop rhythm is not just beat; it is a heartbeat, footstep and raindrop. The bassline breathes low, like roots beneath the surface. When I listen to Chronixx, I hear someone who knows how to plant within that tradition, and how to leave room for things to grow.

When Dread & Terrible landed, it didn’t feel like an album drop. It felt like a first rain: raw, mineral, unpolished, and necessary. That project seeded something. Then Chronology came, years later, with the fullness of fruit. It was thick with sunlight, more expansive, confident. Then came the 2020 singles, hints of an upcoming album, followed by the silence.

Three years. Nearly four. The questions came louder than any chorus: Where is he? What happened? But even in the drought, I called on what our ancestors knew and the modern world forgets: absence is not always lack, it’s preparation.

When he finally spoke, it wasn’t with a rollout. It was a whisper, an intention: “My peace of mind is more important than anything.” Said to the world like a psalm. Because in a culture that demands constant production, choosing rest is its own kind of rebellion.

Still, he was never fully gone. I’d catch his voice the way you catch scent on wind. On SAULT’s 11, Air, Faith, his presence stitched into sound like a mycelium network: hidden, vital. Then Understand Yourself with Theo Croker. A song that didn’t just play, it grew. I listened to it like someone watching new shoots in soil. I felt it again on Pon di Plaza, with Yussef Dayes; an unfolding. A deliberate flowering. On Daniel Caesar’s Unstoppable, his voice surfaced like mist off the hillside: uncredited, but unmistakable. And more recently, on Smino’s Tequan, there he was again, hovering like smoke over new earth.

These weren’t cameos. They were crop signs. Markers of an artist still in motion, still in process. I saw them the way farmers read the sky, small signs that something is shifting underground.

The world now moves at breakneck speed, demanding artists constantly produce to stay relevant. But the land knows better. You can’t farm the same plot nonstop. It needs rest. Chronixx embodies that rhythm by resisting the extractive cycle of modern music culture. His pace follows ancestral wisdom; the rhythm of groundation, of breath, of knowing when to move and when to root.

When I think of his silence now, I think of the fruit trees back home in Jamaica, the ones that give their best only after long, quiet stretches. Mangoes that drop heavy and golden. Breadfruit that must burn before it feeds you. Sorrel that blooms with fire after months of still green. Their silences have taught me to wait without bitterness. To anticipate things without control.

His music, then, is not just an offering. It’s a lesson in tempo, in endurance, in care. The greatest harvests come slow. And those who understand the rhythm, the waiting, the tending, will be the ones who endure.

Some things must simmer, must steep like bush tea, must gather their weight before being shared. So we wait, as we must, for his return. Knowing that when the music comes, it will carry the depth of its waiting: whole, ripe, and necessary.

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The first time I understood the gravity of hair, I was sitting at my grandmother’s feet, head bowed, feeling the gentle but firm pull of her fingers parting my scalp into neat rows. The scent of coconut oil lingered in the air, mingling with the low murmur of soap operas playing in the background. This was more than grooming. This was ritual, geometry, an inherited knowledge passed down through fingers, through time. I didn’t have the words for it then, but what I now know is this: Black hair is a language, a pattern, a fractal repeating itself through generations.

Mathematician Benoît Mandelbrot coined the term "fractal" in 1975, describing self-similar patterns that exist at every scale in nature. Think of the branching of trees, the swirling arms of galaxies, the jagged edges of coastlines, forms that repeat themselves in endless variations, both vast and minuscule. But before Mandelbrot’s equations, before fractals had a name, Black hair had already been shaping itself into this rhythm, twisting and curling into a natural architecture that mirrors the universe itself.

For centuries, the geometry of Black hair has held meaning beyond aesthetics. Mathematician and ethnomathematician Ron Eglash, in African Fractals: Modern Computing and Indigenous Design, revealed that fractal thinking has long been embedded in African traditions. Villages in Mali, textiles in Ghana, beadwork among the Maasai, all reveal a deep mathematical consciousness, an intuitive understanding of recursion and self-similarity. The same principles appear in the intricate braiding patterns that have adorned Black heads for generations.

But hair is more than a mathematical marvel, it is a cultural archive. In my grandmother’s parlor, I watched women enter weary and leave transformed, their spirits lifted along with their edges. Hair was not simply arranged; it was sculpted into memory, woven with stories and laughter.

Cornrows, in particular, carry a layered history. During the transatlantic slave trade, enslaved Africans braided escape routes into their hair, encoding maps to freedom in the language of their curls. In Colombia, women carried grains of rice within their braids, preparing for the long journey ahead. Every plait was a line of resistance, a declaration that even under oppression, innovation would persist.

Even today, Black hair evolves with memory. The styles of our youth, the tight cornrows, the stiff press of a hot comb give way to the looser, freer coils of adulthood. Twist-outs unfurl like ocean waves, locs spiral like galaxies stretching toward infinity. Each stage of life brings a new relationship with hair, a quiet transformation that mirrors the passage of time.

To understand the fractals in Black hair is to recognize the way identity itself is layered, shifting, yet always connected to its origins. It is to see the universe not just in the sky or in the vastness of nature, but in the mirror, in the coils that spring from our scalps, in the hands that braid and unbraid our history. Black hair is a cosmos unto itself; a sacred mathematics, a living testament to the beauty of repetition, evolution, and infinite possibility.

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In a sold-out room in New York City, silence was the softest kind of thunder. Cleo Sol stood cloaked in a dress the color of hibiscus at dusk, the stage bare of spectacle, the lighting warm as breath. A full band stood behind her, drums, keys, bass, guitar, all understated like brushstrokes in the background of a painting. And there were singers too, their harmonies rising like breath, filling the space without ever overpowering it. There was no choreography, no theatrical movement, just the natural sway of bodies responding to sound, no public address. Just her voice, clear, reverent, almost prayerful, and the crowd that answered in whispers and humming, like congregants in an invisible church. This wasn’t performance. It was presence.

What stirred beneath that moment was something deeper than sound. It was a vibration rooted in devotion, in what is likely built when no one is watching. Cleo Sol's music, and by extension her rare appearances, feel less like industry and more like inheritance. You don't attend her shows to witness a star. You enter them to remember the quiet instinct to belong to yourself in a way the world keeps asking you to forget.

Behind this sanctified stillness is the unseen force of the ever-mythic producer Inflo, her partner in both life and music. Their creative and romantic partnership is rarely spoken of publicly, yet it forms the undercurrent of every track, every album. They have made an empire of sound without spectacle, an archive of soul music that feels rooted in both Black British interiority and the sonic textures of diaspora spiritual traditions. In a world addicted to access, theirs is a masterclass in withholding.

There is power in their privacy. In an age where oversharing is currency and algorithms demand faces more than frequencies, Cleo Sol and Inflo have composed a stillness that refuses spectacle. Albums drop without promotion, without interviews, without identity merchandising. And yet the world listens; not just listens, but leans in. Because what they create is not content. It is communion.

Inflo’s production doesn’t just support Cleo's voice, it mirrors their intimacy. The drums fall like a shared pulse. The strings shimmer like breath caught mid-sigh. There’s a domesticity to the sound, as though we are eavesdropping on something sacred. Their music doesn't live on billboards but in bedrooms, prayer corners, vinyl shelves, in the secret corners of people’s lives. This is the sonic equivalent of a lover brushing lint off your shoulder before you leave the house, of a hand reaching instinctively to cover yours during prayer, of silence shared over morning tea, of knowing glances across a dinner table when no words are needed. Small, tender, unforgettable.

At her Radio City Music Hall concert in NYC, the love between artist and audience was palpable, but it also echoed the deeper love that allowed the music to exist in the first place. Sol's restraint, her soft-spoken power, her refusal to become a spectacle, all of it is made possible by the invisible architecture that Inflo helps sustain. His absence on stage isn’t a void, it’s part of the design. He doesn’t just shape sound; he builds the space for something sacred to unfold.

What they make together isn’t just sound, it’s a feeling, a whole environment you step into. It’s what happens when love leads the process, when the studio becomes a safe space, when every note is chosen not to chase attention but to stay honest. In that way, their collaboration returns music to its original function: to heal, to hold, to hush the noise.

Love is the producer. And in the hush of a sold-out room, we heard it.

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Mikhail’s apartment is part flora and part metal precision. These parts clasp hands in an unusually natural way, symptomatic of his rich design background, Caribbean descent and the strong imprint of his partner Vern, who is from the Czech Republic.

After over a decade in design engineering at West Elm, Mikhail recently launched his own design studio called Studio Liguanea, named after the street in Kingston, Jamaica where he grew up.

Over Jamaican tea, we do some catching up and a lot of rambling (we both have pisces sun lol) and Vern’s valuable direction launch us into our discussion.

CD: Talk to me about the dichotomy of design in your apartment. I’m seeing lots of stainless steel but also a lot of wood, plants and earth elements.

MB: I think the design in my apartment represents a perfect dichotomy between my taste and my partner’s taste. Growing up my mom and aunt were serial estate and garage sale shoppers and all the tables and walls in my house were always decorated with small decorative accessories so I've always had a natural inclination to a more “found objects” kind of interior design with sentimentality attached to most things. Not so much maximalist but definitely not minimalist. My girlfriend on the other hand is very much a minimalist. She grew up in the Czech Republic and her approach to design is more subtractive and simple. Clean lines and open spaces more driven by functional design than decorative accessorized design like I am. She's into clean and cool stainless steel and chrome objects while I'm into warm and heavy wood and textures. The beauty in our apartment now lies in that balance and tension between simple but still sentimental design.

CD: That is such a perfect balance. Okay, so let's talk about your objects:

Wooden Stool

MB: Weird “stool” is the very first thing I ever made in college 16 years ago. The brief was to design and make a stool. I'm not sure what the exact inspiration was but I remember thinking I wanted to make an object with multiple functions that was more sculptural than traditional. It's made of solid black walnut. You can stand on it, sit on it, use it to display objects. It's served as a plant stand, a night stand, a foot rest and I'm sure it'll have many more lives.

Chess Board

MB: I spent 7 years working at West Elm as a furniture design engineer and we always had crazy samples sales of one off samples that vendors/factories would send us. This chess board was a sample made in a combination of terrazzo and marble that was never released. I've never seen another chessboard like it to this day. The chess pieces are 3D printed replicas of Josef Hartwig's Model I chess set created in 1922 at Bauhaus Weimar I found on Etsy.

One Good Turn: A Natural History of the Screwdriver and the Screw Book

MB: Can't remember how I first heard of this book but once I did I knew I had to have it. My degree is in industrial design but my first major was civil engineering and I've always thought of myself as symmetrically left brained and right brained. I love design but also have a deep passion for understanding how things are made. This book piques my left brain interests in technical details while also serving my right brain through that story of technical development  unlocking an imaginative universe of endless applications, of the screw lol. I won't give you the cliff notes but it's an incredible story spanning the length of modern civilization. It's a great short read.

Jamaican Vintage Painting

MB: I bought this painting on my last trip to Jamaica. It's by a reputable local artist and was bought at a craft village walking distance from my mom's second house in Port Antonio, Jamaica. I love it for many reasons. Obviously it reminds me so much of home, all Jamaicans have witnessed this exact scene at a bus stop many times and I love how much animation the painter was able to capture. Feels like the painting is moving every time I look at it.

Coffee Table turned bar table

MB: This table is also from my time at West Elm. This is a sample of a table that we developed with local artisans based in Haiti. It's hand made from rebar and black papier-mâché. Great simple design with a great story.

Domino Set

MB: I'd just like to first state that I'm not very good at dominoes so please don't challenge me.

I came across this domino set in a famous hardware/home goods store in Marseille called Maison Empereur that was founded in 1827. It is a veritable treasure trove of home goods mostly local or made in Europe and they had a great toy section. Growing up in Jamaica dominoes are an institution and I don't know about you but I'd never seen blue dominoes before I had to get them.

“Nuh Piss Yaso” signage

MB: I got this from a dear friend in Jamaica. I believe her aunt had started a small business reproducing funny signs and posters she'd seen across the island. This translates to Do Not Urinate Here.

Photo: India

MB: Early in my career I'd travel to Delhi, India twice a year to work with various factories in northern India. There's a 4 hour stretch of highway between Delhi and Moradabad and one year while there during the spring Holi festival we drove through a huge caravan of revelers and I shot this on a point and shoot film camera hanging out the window. It reminds me a lot of my time in India. Wild, colorful and always moving.

You can check out some of Mikhail’s great design work here & his social pages here & here.

Maryland raised, New York based designer and ceramist Nathalyn Nunoo is disarmingly charming as she is direct. She insists that her ID will work on the next try, as the delivery guy crowds the doorway of her Brooklyn pad with his insulated bag and uses Google translator to let us know that he can’t drop off any alcohol without a working ID. The frustration doesn’t stop her insistence and as she predicted, it finally worked.

Nathalyn, similarly insistent about what she likes, has an apartment decorated with the blueprint of her incredible taste, its own romantic charm and a real sense of individuality.

CD: I love the hints of romance in your apartment. Were those choices intentional? Do they represent your personality in any way?

NN: Not so much intentional, just pieces I’ve collected or have made over time. I think they definitely do show my personality - I’m a romantic at heart! A little lost in the clouds for sure but with a bit of edge. Growing up I used to daydream a lot, literally just hours looking up into space creating plots and characters in my mind. I used to read a lot of fantasy/science fiction, a kind of escapism; I was obsessed. I think I loved the aspect of world building, and living vicariously through femme characters that were a little weird, very tough-girl but entangled in romance and softness. I think as an adult this comes out as random objects that create a sense of delicate ambiance; candles, soft lighting, ceramics all kind of gesture at this soft whimsical thing I like.

Let's talk about some of your objects.

Nest Poetry Zine

NN: I started going to the poetry open mic at Ornithology Jazz Club a couple years ago - last year I started hosting it, and over time it's become the most beautiful community of artists + writers who are willing to share so generously. We created an anthological zine of works by 11 of us last summer, including these lovely illustrations by one of the club’s bartender’s named Peter Hopkins. The whole thing was laid out by Tiffany Tang, who happened to stumble upon the open mic one night and volunteered to design it. So it’s a lovely piece (visually too, I can’t turn the design mind off its cute!) and a testament to this community of folks who are vulnerable every week, and have honestly been a huge part of my healing journey. 

Glass Collection

NN: If there’s one thing I love to collect it’s a glass. I think there’s something in it that’s so grounding for me - the concept of something that’s beautiful and can last forever but also shatter in a moment. It’s fascinating. My mom has a thing for nice tableware that she used to bring out for special occasions. I feel like I liked the ritual of it; it felt special because it was. It’s one of the few things we agreed on and that feels special. I think it kind of gets at that idea of pretend I mentioned earlier. It makes me feel fancy and interesting. You can build a whole persona around it. I got these green ones thrifting from a guy who sold them to me as Venetian (back when I didn’t know better lol), I got the one with a red dot from my friend Yeli when she went to Kenya; this tall wiry looking one is from an artist in Paris, Ulysse Sauvage; this one is part of a set my mom gave me when I was packing up to leave MD for NY. I have a couple from a designer I admire, Eny Lee Parker and a couple from my neighbor who really came through to make me feel at home in the building when it was crazy. So yeah it’s a fun thing I like; it’s cute, it’s functional. It’s a little pleasure. 

Fossilized Rock

NN: I got this from my friend Mackenzie! She went to London and walked along the coast and found these fossils - I think it’s super cool! I’m always inspired by natural elements, a lot of my ceramic work follows this. I like how it’s just a piece of casual history sitting on my coffee table, a little prehistoric drama. 

Painting from Ghana

NN: I spent a lot of time in Ghana over the last couple years, mainly to explore local design culture and connect with folks in architecture. There’s an abundance of craft/arts everywhere, it’s so casual. I went to the arts market and picked this up from a stack of hundreds. I like it because it has color but is minimal still - I have a hard time resonating with  bright patterns so this suited me. I like how people are hidden in plain sight in an abstract pattern, it’s getting at a collective, communal energy that I associate with old Ghanaian culture. It has a sense of regality but is still warm that way. It must’ve cost like 7 dollars and they were still likely ripping me off lol. 

Look I Bought Plants Book

NN: When I moved to New York my first real place was a sublet from this comedian, Taylor Garron. She gave the tour of the apartment (very grown up for me at the time) and was friendly in a ‘Fellow Black girl’ way. She was like what do you do? and I said I work with plants because I was designing an office at the time and added that I was writing a poetry book. She said something like “You’re gonna love this shit” and handed me a copy of a book of funny poems she wrote with a friend. I think it’s the perfect intersection of my interests - home-making, poetry, a little shit-talking. Chef’s kiss. 

Individual Portrait

NN: These I got from an artist couple in Ghana. I’d met the husband Edward at an exhibition opening one night and he asked if I was down to model for a painting for him and his wife, Fran. I came to their home in Ordorkor and sat chatting with them for a while, awkwardly sitting and sipping a cool beer. They’re a fun pair! I loved talking to them because they felt like artist folk in Accra that I could relate to; we talked about local politics, accessibility to the arts, afro-diasporic proliferation, etc. It was one of the first times I felt at home in Ghana. It was also nice seeing myself through another lens, I could definitely see some of my family’s features more clearly. It kind of shocked me to see myself look ‘Ghanaian’ - I think growing up in the US I always felt detached from it so maybe some silly part of me didn’t expect it was there. But it really is. 

CD: & lastly, Birds of Paradise Plant.
NN: I love it! Its big and beautiful, easy to care for. I love massive plants, they’re like a whole person on their own— it keeps me company. Birds of Paradise produce this flower (when they're happy with you and mature, so not in my lil’ NY apartment) that do resemble a tropical bird. I had one on my birthday cake!

I kind of love it for a fun memory too: I studied biology in college and for my last credit I ended up doing a lab with this professor, Gerald Borgia, who single handedly has the biggest repository for observation on Bower Birds, commonly referred to as birds of paradise. These birds are all genetically so close but look and behave wildly different in terms of color, plumage, mating calls, and even dance rituals. I studied how all of these characteristics evolve, map to their environment and relate to mating behavior. It was about 6 months or something of spreadsheets and watching hundreds of videos of bird sex. Another romantic thing in my apt I suppose!

You can keep abreast of Nathalyn’s gorgeous design and ceramic work here or via her socials ::: & _nathalyn_ on instagram.

In late March, spring ushered in it’s cluster of flowers and light and something happened to my psychological and somatic state.

In a lot of ways, like trained poets do, I romanticized the transition. Some semblance of the heroine’s journey made its way into my daydreams. My psychic transformation would resemble nature, like darkness before the dawn. And so on. But in reality, the change of the season, coupled with the chaotic energy of an eclipse and the planets being in retrogade have left me feeling completely mute, immobile and misunderstood.

There are things that have been transforming in my subconscious and I have had to be quiet to hold hands with that wisdom. I have found salve in the blooming crocuses and magenta tulips, ombre pansies and resilient daffodils. I have sat at the feet of the weeping cherry tree and at some point mouthed a prayer: I love you, I hope my transformation is as beautiful as you.

But perhaps those are precisely the hours when solitude grows,

for its growth is painful and sad

like the beginning of spring

(Rainer Maria Rilke)

These past few weeks have been volatile with a mixture of high intensity emotions calmed with the beauty of plant wisdom and finally, the charm of a new season winging through the city like a monarch butterfly.

To some extent, I think I’m on the other side of it all. And so with such a meaningful past few weeks, I’ve dropped the guilt of my inconsistency in posting here and living in a robotic way; something I’ve “struggled” with my entire life. At some point, I also dropped that western backdrop of categorizing divergence as illness and seized the power in my own intuitive navigation.

So if you didn’t take this from all I just said: I haven’t been writing much. & beating the writing muse on it’s head everyday was just not working. I made peace with the fact that the time was not ripe. Mostly, I’ve been doing what a person with triple pisces placements is inclined to do: honoring my feelings and just going with the flow.

Then, recently, I felt like it was time.

I started this Substack mostly as a way to share my own individual studies and wondering. I seldom try to pitch for magazines, journals or news media outlets simply because there seems to be a specialized voice that one has to embody to write for different publications. A voice that is sometimes completely devoid of my own. And so for me, sometimes, its just not worth the hassle.

Read the rest of this essay preferably with some Lonnie Liston Smith in the background.

In my quiet, I’ve been doing my own individual research on the balm of nature. I wanted to locate black women in nature art or stills and I wanted to read about black women’s (healing & transformational) experiences in nature.

I began to think about the nature painter himself, Claude Monet. The thought was seeded by some photos and videos that I had taken over time of women around me in nature. They were intuitive shots I didn’t really think about but they were taken in a way that the body was centered in a natural environment and resembled still paintings.

I searched furiously for black women in Monet’s catalogue and mostly did not find anything or much to speak of.

All I found was an epitaph of his inspirational time in Algeria where he served in the First Regiment of African Light Cavalry. Was Monet inspired by black life? Yes. Did he paint about it? No.

Monet also did not use the color black in his paintings. Apparently this is an art world norm but leave it to me to find some kind of metaphor in that. He would later comment that “the light and vivid colours of North Africa contained the gem of my future researches”.

What about Monet’s time in Algeria translated into his future work? I searched for the evidence but couldn’t locate the blackness or brownness.

I started to think of the myopia of our own individual gaze. I challenged myself and my conclusions from all the information I had just read. What part of my life and inspirations were selective and omitted things. The fact still remained, self observation or not, Monet did not paint black women.

There are many historical trends that can be considered here. For instance, the trend of the greek to white-wash black subjects like the black Ethiopian princess Andromeda.

Perseus, the demigod from Greek mythology kills a sea monster and saves the beautiful princess Andromeda from being eaten. Though Andromeda is described as having dark and or black features she is continuously displayed in artwork as having white features.

The painting cannot be taken out of context and the continuous omission of black bodies in art clearly became a trend in the future work of other artists because this tendency is not singular.

As irony would have it, Monet, painter and poet of the eye, would lose his sight later in his life, having never painted a black woman or even a black body that the world knew of.

Here are some pictures and art references that I did actually find:

From top left : Whoopi Goldberg in a field of flowers, Kiara Kuburu in Marakesh for Elle, Woman in Sunflower Field, Nose Towards Grass, Sza in a Tree, Reading Amongst the Flowers

Artists from top left: Ruud Van Empel, Kiki Elice, Hana Ward, NearBound, Heleena Tattoos and Romare Bearden

I wanted to christen my newest Substack series; Objects, a curation of people’s interiors and favorite things, with my friend Ayanna Heaven: a Jamaican born, Brooklyn DJ and my favorite conversational ethnomusicologist.

Some of Ayanna’s recent career highlights include her incredible Boiler Room set & her charming Sounds of Heaven radio show on Lot Radio that is usually on my Thursday morning radar.

On one particularly recent, frigid and rainy Saturday, me and Ayanna meet near the UWS where she just wrapped a radio show on WKCR. We struggle to share my mini umbrella, grab some Shake Shack sandwiches and fries with mayo, ketchup and cholula and shriek after getting splashed by oncoming traffic while crossing the street to head to her Brooklyn apartment.

With the backdrop sounds of Bunny Wailer’s Bide Up on vinyl, the views of Ayanna’s radiant Brooklyn space and a very potent ital spliff passed around, the downer of the weather begins to brighten and we chat more about the space and her favorite objects.

CD: If I were to guess your personal aura color, it would be the color of your apartment. What personal connection do you feel towards the color orange?

AH: Growing up my hair would turn pretty red from the sun. It’s something that runs on both sides of my family but only shows up in everyone as children. It was often a topic of conversation because even though it runs in the family, my hair would sometimes get particularly bright. I honestly don’t know if that was the reason why I often gravitate to orange as a color, but it might be. It’s just one of those things that just is, you know? It’s funny because I wouldn’t even say it’s my all time favorite color, but I definitely feel like at my essence, I am orange.

CD: Talk me through some of the items you picked out and why you love them.

Herbie Mann’s Sugarloaf - Jazz Impressions of Brazil on vinyl

AH: One of my favorite instruments is definitely the flute. You can pretty much guarantee that if the tune has flutes, I’m probably going to like it. I discovered Herbie Mann’s music a few months ago (I know, I’m late!)  and I picked up this record at A-1 Record Shop in the East Village, definitely one of my favorite record shops.

I am a big fan of Brazilian music. In high school I was obsessed with the song “Belle” by Jack Johnson. The song is only 1 minute and 42 seconds long so I would just listen to it on repeat. I ended up typing it into Pandora to see what similar songs it would serve me up, and this was the moment I discovered Brazilian Jazz. Turns out what I loved about the song was that it was a simple Bossa Nova guitar melody. I fell in love with the sounds of João Gilberto, Antônio Carlos Jobim, and Gal Costa. I later discovered that my mom loved it too! It was something we loved listening to together.

Back to A-1, I found this record and when I listened to the first track and realized it was a cover of “Aquarela Do Brasil,” titled as simply “Brazil,” I knew I had to have it as it was one of my mom’s favorite songs. What’s even better is that the cover is of the Christ Redeemer, which is the setting that my mom heard that song and fell in love with it. A choir bursted out into song near our group and it was so magical. It was one of my mom’s favorite memories. The entire record is lovely.

Fish Cheeks Zabb Seasoning

AH: My favorite restaurant in New York City is Fish Cheeks. They serve authentic Thai food with a seafood focus, and I dream about their coconut crab curry, crab fried rice, fried fish, oysters, and sautéed cabbage. Seriously, the entire menu is amazing.

They use this Zabb seasoning on their wings and I always have a container in my pantry. It’s wonderful - salty, sweet, spicy and like no other seasoning I’ve ever tried, a blend of lemongrass, makrut lime leaves, and thai chili powder as described on the label. I like to add it to my hard boiled eggs, salt and pepper shrimp, and fried green plantain. 

Family Portrait

AH: One of my most treasured pictures is this one of me, my sister, mom, and grandma back in 2018. I come from an incredible lineage of women and I have received so much love, wisdom, care, and guidance from them. This picture lives at eye level on my bookshelf and I look at it every day.

Franco Rosso’s Babylon & Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing on DVD

AH: My two favorite movies. I had the honor of doing the patois subtitles for Babylon for the long overdue US release back in 2019. Listening and watching it as closely as I had to just made my love it even more.

Both films are incredibly beautiful visually and masterfully explore the socio-economic dynamics of urban life in the 80’s. I love how well they capture the cultural fabric of post-Windrush Caribbean London and the so-called melting pot of Brooklyn, New York. Both films use storytelling of the everyday experience to reflect the respective cultural backdrops. They also both use music SO wonderfully! Now that I think about it, they are actually super similar films. Both really important and inspiring to me as an artist.

One lonely plantain :)

AH: The love for the banana is real in my life. My home parish in Jamaica is known as the banana parish, St. Mary, and you can always count on several bunches of different varieties in various stages of ripeness on our kitchen counter as my grandpa has a banana farm. 

“Fry-and-squeeze” fried green plantain as well as fried ripe plantain were staples with every Jamaican breakfast in our household. When I was little a lot of my family also called me Ayanna Banana. I have a tattoo of a painting of a plantain bunch and I usually have one (or three) in my fruit bowl. The love is real.

CD: Thanks you so much for this incredible overview.

Black Orpheus

The first time I watched this film I stayed glued to what seemed to me, a larger than usual MAC computer screen. It was a perfect moment contrasted with the sub par vibes of the person I was on a date with at the time. I’ve found myself unintentionally dating guys based on their taste. I don’t have a physical type per say, but I think history would suggest that I do have an mind type. Needless to say the film was perhaps the only highlight of that tryst and the only thing that stayed with me.

As for the film itself, its one of my favorites because it glides from beginning to end like a vibrant South American daydream, loosely based on the greek Orpheus-Eurydice legend. With the origin notes of bossa nova, the beauty of Marpessa Dawn and the wild joy of carnival, you’re sure to also find this one a treat.

[Watch anywhere on this list (from $2.99 - $3.99USD)]

Rewind And Play

This documentary chronicles a short interval in Jazz pianist Theolonius Monk’s life in Paris, at the end of one of his European tour’s in Autumn 1969.

It was heartbreaking to watch this film at first because of the lack of respect for black musicians that shone like neon throughout it. Monk’s quiet fury in this documentary also lingered in my thoughts for a while. A quality that felt flag-bearing for black culture and also the specific time period.

[You can watch this if you have an Amazon Prime membership or Apple TV]

Atlantiques

This is the only film on this list where I felt the urgency to mention it’s filmmaker. Mark this one as the first public foray into the strange and beautiful mind of Mati Diop. The film stretches the borders of migration, supernatural romance and gives you something to feel.

[You can watch this one with a Netflix subscription.]

Embrace of the Serpent

This film was recommended to me a couple years ago by my close friend Ananda who has superb taste so I knew it would be good. It however made me shake my head at certain points because of the wild but expected behavior played out by its characters. It also conjured up some rage from me at the end of the film. Ciro Guerro’s oeuvre is admirable and this is one of his best films to date, rivaling only his film Birds of Passage.

Expect science, supremacy and religious bastardization in this one.

[You can watch it here]

Have a great weekend everyone and I’d love to hear in the comment box what you all are watching and films you recommend watching on this cozy weekend inside.

If you know me, then you already know Anais Nin is high up there in my favorite writers of all time. I started reading Nin at a time when the consumption of beauty was the only balm I had for my own individual healing.

I was in a season where my lows were lowest and if something would burden my mind and my heart then the only thing I could muster up the strength to do was to look away. To friends I had become a go-to, I retreated. To causes I would have usually had the grit to fire up, I cooled. And for the often recommended books from stars of the black literary canon, steeped in political commentary, I just did not have the bandwidth.

It was here that I made the decision to feed myself with things I found to be beautiful. I know that some parts of this may sound saccharine or even a bit cliche. Even the thought of it at the time made me aware that for this undertaking I did not have the guts alone without my rational mind’s interference. I would need a committed patron saint to hold my hand through this sacred cause. And that was Nin.

So with this awareness, I laid microscopic all the things that I suspected held me back from the emotional transformation I so badly craved, so I could attempt to transcend a kind of cultural normalcy that now felt harmful to me. I thought about who I would upset and the legacy of black women’s strength, usually at the expense of self-sacrifice. And as for that life sucked dry of itself?—I just didn’t want it.

“Have you the courage to live something inhuman? The poem?” writes Nin in Mirages: The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin, 1939–1947. A diary decorated with stories about her many lovers and her much memorialized bicoastal trapeze. A term she often used to describe the clandestine double marriage she shared with two different men on different coasts. These men never knowing about each other til nearing the end of her life.

In New York Nin was married to Hugh Guiler, filmmaker and skilled engraver in his own right, though it was his successful banking career that lubricated her life with luxury and a sense of financial ease that became a well-needed safety net for some of her more experimental literary projects. In California she lived a contrasting life with Rupert Pole, a mountaineer and bohème who played viola, studied astrology and was much a drifter than anything else but who she would describe as the most potent man she ever met. In-between the allure of bigamy, her life was bejeweled with her art, lovers of the arts and artistic lovers. The famed psychologist Otto Rank, Gore Vidal, Henry Miller and even his wife June are rumored to have had their own trysts with Nin.

Aside from the peacock-display of her life choices, blaring with color and controversy, Nin was mostly an introvert only laying bare her secrets and unconventional life choices in her voluminous diaries. She was a writer deeply obsessed with depth who possessed an aversion for things that seemed shallow. The vapid was below her and the lovers she magnetized were only a physical manifestation of her unrelenting love of life and her commitment to living the life of an artist.

In sharing similar astrology placements with Nin, I often could feel her angst. Her bravery to follow her own internal compass, to love and feel satiated and proud as well as to love and feel challenged, insufficient and minuscule was the lesson I was seeking in her life’s imprint; the dichotomy of vulnerability. Anais Nin had the sheer audacity to love, to love, to love life with every gaping breath and to feel its pain, the flip-coin of pleasure.

“Create Anais”, she writes in her diary. “Every word you wrote was always the golden key which opened the doors of your prison. It is your female chant… your ornament, your grace, your seduction. Create Anais. [They] will come”.

To that I say yes. Absolutely yes.

[If you’re intrigued but not sure where to start with reading Nin’s oeuvre, I recommend starting here & here.]

thank me later.

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The year was 1988—two decades after reggae’s golden moment.

In the wake of Bob Marley passing, the genre’s crowned King, the echoing effects of reggae would still saturate the ears of the world. This would seed a generation of astute Jamaican musicians who would travel the globe in colossal demand.

From Serge Gainsbourg’s unsanctimonious collaboration with Sly and Robbie and the I-threes to Patti Smith’s oddly-placed Redondo Beach, to Lizzie Mercer Descloux’s hiring Steven Stanley as her de-facto producer—everyone seemed to want a piece of reggae’s sonical magic.

When I came to live in NYC years ago as a nascent writer and musician filled with questions, I began to notice something that might tie this all together. I had taken for granted that the music I had grown up with in Jamaica was connected to something unseen, something we didn’t have to explain but that I knew made it so popular and timeless. That same quality—whatever it was—felt missing in the art I was consuming in the city. The absence was loud. It felt like a kind of a spiritual static.

Back home, musicians will refer to this mysterious and cosmic thing as the feel — a spiritual connectivity that chain links you to the thing you’re listening to or experiencing. Something deeper than the rhythm. Something alive.

It is possible that the quality might also be cultural. Often, Jamaicans use the phrase: “Mi spirit take him”, this roughly means: The hands of my spirit holds the hands of another person’s without measurable reasoning or explanation. It doesn’t require logic. It doesn’t ask permission. It just is a vibration of connection based on the unseen.

I say all of this to say that Jamaicans are spiritual people. You don’t have to look farther than our unique Guinness Book of World record for having the most churches per square mile. But this is not about religion. At all.

Whether or not you believe in spirituality or fate, or anything to that song, on December 21, 1988 something peculiar happened in Reggae music history.

A group of popular Jamaican musicians, specifically the illustrious Sly Dunbar and Robbie Shakespeare, the islands beloved rhythm twins, would reach a satisfied end to their Taxi Gang Connection tour in Europe, featuring many special guests (including the indomitable Freddie McGregor, golden crooner Maxie Priest and saxophonist Dean Fraser) later employing the services of popular booking agent Copeland Forbes to jet set them home to the warmth of their families in the oncoming Christmas season.

Picture some bright-eyed but exhausted musicians with wallets fluffed from three months of touring trying to find the quickest route home to be in the arms of loved ones and escape one of London’s harshest winters.

Plans were set to fly on December 21st, 1988 on Pan AM flight 103 from Heathrow transiting through New York and then to Kingston when Freddie McGregor made a very inspired but out of character decision. McGregor would decide to change his flying plans to route through Miami instead of New York so he could buy Christmas gifts for his loved ones. This decision, luckily favored by the group’s majority, spread like wild fire and changed Copeland’s pre-planned itinerary entirely.  

It was decided. Freddie McGregor, Dean Fraser and Copeland Forbes would take the earlier flight, two days  before the scheduled departure date, stopping in Miami, while Sly, Robbie and Maxi Priest would stay behind. No concrete plans were made with the latter and in the absence of cellphones and possibly the non-specificity of the male species, all went their separate ways.

After settling down at Dean Fraser’s hotel in Miami, following a full day of shopping,  the crew would glimpse an image of the wreckage of Pan Am flight 103 that was bombed by terrorists over Lockerbie Scotland on the hotel’s muted television. The same flight the entire crew were scheduled to be on that day. This day would mark one of the worst terrorist attacks in history, killing a total of 270 people.

In an understandable tizzy, the musicians phoned Island records to source the location of Sly, Robbie and Maxi Priest who were still supposed to board the flight. Insomnia rocked the house as timezone differences made it difficult to reach anyone on the phone in the UK and everyone had to wait until the morning. Luckily and thanks to fates hand, an insider would confirm that the men did not board the flight either and decided to take a later British airlines flight home instead. All were safe and unscathed.

With sighs of relief, and thanks-be-to-Jah’s, the musicians would all make it safely home, weighted with the guilt of survival and a hovering fear of flying for a very long time.

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Teezo Touchdown’s voice towers above the gloom of my thoughts today.

“I know that I’ma make it, baby, no if, and or buts. I know that I’m a superstar but no one’s looking up” he croons.  Another New York Sunday centering myself in a snow storm, before the work week starts. This week’s bullet list of responsibilities weigh down on me giving me an unusual feeling of anxiety. In the midst of this, and funny enough, I’m thinking about Freedom. What that might mean for me and even the people around me. 

“God, I hate Mondays. I'm overworked and underpaid

I’m a little old for roommates

I think it’s time I find my own place

I believe in aliens, I don’t believe in luck

I’m running, grinding, jumping, climbing, but I still feel stuck

I know that I’ma make it, baby no if, ands or buts

I know that I’m a superstar, but no-ones looking up”.

(Teezo Touchdown, Familiarity)

When I think about it, I recall earlier moments in my childhood growing up in rural Jamaica with low-levels of stimulation. How I would dream up a glittering life outside the island of my neighborhood street. My days were straightforward: dinner, homework, chores and church. At a point, we didn’t even have cable TV. Anything I saw, read, heard, watched anywhere became a springboard for my imagination. This was my travel less journey outside the confines of my environment. 

When my family first got dial up internet, I remember pulling a long (maybe 10 ft) coiled cord out of my parents’ room, which was where the only telephone was for the modem, and trailing it towards my room to a cumbersome desktop computer, a gift from my father who lived in New York at the time. With this, I would spend hours and hours researching any single thing my mind could imagine just to hoist me away from the banal and the mundane. With the financial limitations of the time I could spend on the internet, I devoured books and music; American hip-hop and R&B albums. These were my tools of freedom and expanse. The only tools I had at the time.

Today I am thinking again of that little girl, the one who was never a stranger to a world of limitations yet an imagination of infinite distance. After all, it was her dream that got me to New York, but that’s another story for another time. Yet Teezo Touchdown’s dream of himself parallels in my thoughts, his rock influence originating from his Dad’s records and being a past DJ. His appearance at most, silver-a striking sheen to every picture I pull up of him. Everything I read about him is a sharp amalgamation of everything his music represents. To me, the true artist is the one most specific to themselves but most of all their imagination.

& all of us have our tools. The beautiful objects that enrich our imaginations and project us into the futures of ourselves. In the midst of war, imperialism, financial woes, depression and white supremacism - Our imagination becomes the balm of our lives. The tales, the histories and the song makers that came with us and before us help us to get to the other side of realities chains.

And with this, my first substack post, I’d like to think of this as my little caged butterfly being released into the world. I hope to make this frequent, my tiny glistening catharsis, after not really writing in four years. This is my weight being lifted and I hope you read along and imagine with me… & subscribe.

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