A brilliant novelist on her husband's COVID death, BLM, immeasurable grief.

[nolabear]

Jesmyn Ward is my favorite novelist. She and I grew up in the same area, probably twenty five years and one big racial divide apart. She is one of the most stunningly talented people on the planet and her grief—her cry—is sad and beautiful beyond measure.

Take a minute.

Link to tweet

[demmiblue]

1. That was incredibly moving.

I didn't realize until the end that I hadn't taken full breaths. Deep exhale and tears.

Thank you for sharing.

[LuckyCharms]

2. A hard hitting and emotional read. Thank you.

[CaliforniaPeggy]

3. A great read, my dear nolabear...

Her words are like river water, or music, or some of each. Astonishing, heartrending, glorious, maddening.

Thank you.

[Nevilledog]

4. That left a mark.

I'm still crying.

[demmiblue]

5. The artist whose work was illustrated in that piece:

Into the Deep End with Calida Rawles

“It was about five years ago when water entered my life,” says Los Angeles-based painter Calida Rawles. Pregnant with her third daughter, she began swimming. “It started as exercise, and then it became almost like a therapy. I learned how to really swim as an adult. My breathing became more meditative. I felt so much better in the water.”

Soon after, she embarked on creating the body of work for which she has subsequently become celebrated: gorgeous, photorealistic paintings of black figures immersed in turquoise waters. Ta-Nehisi Coates commissioned Rawles to paint the cover of his most recent novel The Water Dancer, published in 2019. In February, her debut solo exhibition, “A Dream For My Lilith,” opened at Various Small Fires in Los Angeles and included that book’s cover painting in the project space while the main gallery was given over entirely to paintings of women and girls. Even before the show opened, all of the paintings were spoken for, mostly by museums and collectors joining a long waiting list for Rawles’s work. Lilith, the Book of Apocrypha tells us, was Adam’s first wife, before God created Eve from his rib. Lilith refused to be subservient to her husband and was ultimately cursed by God for abandoning him. “Black females are often seen as negative, as argumentative or difficult,” says Rawles, “and chastised in that same way.”

Rawles says she feels that her compositions are, above all, celebratory. “In my culture, seeing black bodies in water is special.” While for her personally, swimming might be a tool for self-care—a means of escaping both the immediate demands of family life and, more broadly, the pressures of contemporary black life in America—black bodies have not historically been associated with swimming pools. There are complex reasons why—even today, sixty-four percent of African American children are not able to swim—and these are rooted in racial segregation, Jim Crow laws and economic disparity. A painting such as Little Swimmer (2016), showing a young black girl surging beneath the surface of the water, is therefore a vision of hope and freedom.

https://www.culturedmag.com/calida-rawles/

Some of her work (via: https://www.thisiscolossal.com/2020/06/calida-garcia-rawles-paintings/):

[nolabear]

7. My God. Thank you for sharing that! I passed right by.

[demmiblue]

8. De nada. Both women are still rattling around in my brain. n/t

[emmaverybo]

6. Thank you, Nolabear, for sharing this.