Motherhood has thrown my entire clock out of wack. Infant schedules, then sleep training, now toddler sleep regressions. Lockdown didn’t help my sleep either (yeah remember that era? that’s my villain origin story). Anxiety over COVID, stress over my workload and the general state of the world, monotony of days. Nothing the last three years has helped me get a solid eight hours. And when I go down it is fragile; if anything wakes me between 2 and 5 am, I am basically up for the day. Sometime last year I started to put myself to bed around 8pm just to try to get a few hours in before the kid monitor tore into my psyche, but that also cuts into my own fun, adult time. I read somewhere that there’s a word for staying up past your bedtime or past your sleepiness point when you know you’re exhausted: reverse procrastination. I am a reverse procrastination expert.
I’m not alone, I’m not complaining. Being up in the wee hours has its perks.
But since I’m up, let’s talk apocalypse.
Right now I’m rewatching the new season of TWD dropped on Netflix, so I decided to go back to my favorite season so far. Mad complex. The Alexandria Safe Zone episodes are like a primer for what happens when two groups of survivors with very different experiences of the apocalypse and different visions for the New World, come together. On the one hand you’ve got Rick’s Crew, which has seen THINGS and lost everything. So they’ve had to reimagine everything they ever knew about organizing as a society, about kinship, about social relations. Deanna’s group has lost some things, but they were behind the wall when everything happened. They were never outside. So they want to live, they want to learn to fight, but they also have a stake in the BEFORE. And the BEFORE is gone. It is dead. And some of the first bloody conflicts that happen in Alexandria are around what do to with intimate violence. How to self-police in a world where there are no rules. Do you keep to what you knew BEFORE? Or do you make new rules, embrace a way of living that would have been considered uncivilized before but will probably save your life now? What is acceptable in the NOW because you need to survive and what seeds are necessary to plant in the NOW to see the FUTURE you want to create?
I’m obsessed with learning from the apocalypse, not because it is coming, but because for enslaved Africans, it already happened/is already here. Alexandria Safe Zone, Acorn, Palmares, the cypress swamp, the Dismal swamp….parallels. Black people know the apocalypse in our bones and blood, and we knew it first.
Related, not unrelated, I also saw the Woman King. What a delicious, glorious, fundamentally radical movie. All the girls. ALL THE GIRLS. Viola, Thuso, Lashana, Gina the Director, THE GWORLS WERE GWORLING MY GOD. John Boyega played a king like no royalty of the darker hue I’ve seen on screen before. He wasn’t written as noble, hapless, arrogant, or ignorant. He told that Portuguese man to speak HIS language in HIS country and he said it with bass in his voice. It was fantastic.
And also…Dahomey did not end anyone’s slave trade, lol. Dahomey literally became one of the major players in the slave trade to Brazil, with Brazilian traders stationed at Ouidah deep into the nineteenth century (slavery ends in Brazil in 1888). I never expect history to be accurate in films, but a scrolling footnote across the screen at the end wouldn’t have hurt. But I would take nothing from that film, I will watch it over and over and glory in it because it was a rousing story, a woman-centered story, it passes the test, checks all the boxes, and the information I might need or want from the rest—guess what? We made a whole course curriculum for that called the Woman King Syllabus with every reading you might need to understand the African context of the slave trade and then some.
Maybe I’ll nap now.
Sleep will find us again... one day...I want this for you....(AND I'll gratefully receive these musing until it does...)