Ismatu Gwendolyn
There Is No Revolution without Madness
… I am bound together at the seams by the thought of a new world//what it might cost us//what we stand to gain. I write to you bereaved from watching the avalanches of death manufactured by the United States, via their bloodchildren (the United Nations, the so-called state of Israel, the existence of the US Dollar, and more). I am bereaved from the war in Sudan, knowing that a war of similar groundings burned my grandmother’s home to the ground. I write to you feeling grief bloom in my bones.
The first thing I (Ismatu) do in this essay is give the work presented context. Why do I write this? What does it matter? What does the work of considering sanity (or the lack thereof) change about me?
The next thing I will do in this essay is move through the chosen text: How to Go Mad without Losing Your Mind’s chapter one, “Mad is a Place” written by La Marr Jurelle Bruce. I move through this text with reverence to revolutionary thought, intent, and action as I know them.
And the third thing we (those reading, writing, watching) will do together is consider what it means lay down our sane minds as we move towards means of world-making. Because: there is a world coming after this one. I consider it inevitable. Not “wishful thinking,” not the idealism or hubris of being youg— a new world is coming like the dawn. It’s like a baby being born. It’s inevitable. Capitalism is crumbling around us; the world that comes after this one is up to us. But something is coming.
At the top of this essay, I remind us all: to call for revolution is to call for death. There is no iteration of Western, sanitized Reason that will co-sign the destruction of itself— the system that keeps us at the mercy of our extractors. Death makes the ground fertile for life, as per the design of nature.