The line breaks keep you unbalanced, coming in the middle of phrases, and the imagery feels like a rushing flood—overwhelming in speed and quantity, some familiar, joyful, or sweet, and some frightening. This all feels like it encapsulates some of the experiences of being an immigrant.

“Entering the conversation on call-out culture, I come as a facilitator, mediator, writer, Black mixed-race woman, queer survivor, visionary thinker, healer, doula, and someone dedicated first and foremost to healthy movements that can transform the injustices of our times. I am not an academic, a historian, a psychotherapist, a researcher. I share what I learn through experiences and experiments in and with communities I support.”

Something I notice about the way that brown (I’m using lowercase not out of disrespect, but because this is how they style their name) describes her positionality here is that, with the exception of “writer” and “visionary thinker,” these are roles in which I believe the vast majority of her readers will never encounter her.

I’m not suggesting that brown should therefore not name these sources of perspective that she identifies. Rather, especially reading this in the wake of the call out of Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, there are additional pieces of information that I believe would further contextualize her writing and perspective:

In numbers, what was the readership of the blog post she’s discussing? Was or is the blog monetized? If so, what is the income generated from it, and did that change as a result of the post? What is brown’s combined audience size, between blog, books, podcasts, etc.? Did that change?

She mentions several times that her publisher pushed to publish the blogpost as a book. What was the financial profit the publisher made from this book? What did brown’s compensation look like? What is her income, what do she and those she supports need in living expenses, and what are the sources of income used to cover those necessary expenses?

These questions feel abrasive to me as well. I would not actually enter into a conversation with her to ask any of these things. But I wonder how much of this hesitance to consider this important and public information comes from a culture imposed by people with wealth, because it helps to maintain their power.

I truly welcome any thoughts and disagreements about this. It’s less a position-taking and more something I’m trying to work through.

The line breaks keep you unbalanced, coming in the middle of phrases, and the imagery feels like a rushing flood—overwhelming in speed and quantity, some familiar, joyful, or sweet, and some frightening. This all feels like it encapsulates some of the experiences of being an immigrant.

"—yes, the magic dust our bodies become casts spells on the roots about which someone else could tell you the chemical processes, but it’s just magic to me"

Only a handful of poems in and Gay has this delightful way of describing the little things in life and filling them with such a sense of wonder and awe. The vivid use of imagery is such that I find myself standing alongside him, plucking a plum from the tree, smelling the sweet, tannic scent of the fruit on the air which sounds like a soft chuckle meant only for our ears.