When it comes down to it we must demand – demand – that the spaces that we end up creating make room for us. Which is to say that we need to be very conscious that our needs are takeninto account when spaces are created. After all, it is only when we create spaces for ourselves that we can really make room for others like us. It is only when we expand where our bodies are allowed to occupy that we can make room for other bodies, like ours, to step into those same spaces.
Baldwin speaks of intent – and how we were not intended to be. And it is seen in the design itself that these spaces were not designed with you in mind. They were neither made for you, nor to make room for you. Rather, they were designed to destroy you. To kill that very thing inside you that allows you to be free. To kill that very illusion that you have convinced yourself that you are chasing.
So it is no simple feat to demand that spaces make room for us. After all, the imagination can only be informed by that which is around it. And so capitalist minds continue to reproduce capitalist spaces. In creating spaces for ourselves we continue to propel this same culture of extraction, appropriation, and exploitation. Even in the spaces we create we eliminate ourselves.
But bodies with a stubbornness that cannot be ignored.
And breaking bodies speak loudest.
So even as we fight to erase ourselves our bodies demand. Our bodies demand that the spaces we create create space for us. Our bodies demand that the spaces we create allow us to live. And it is just the complicated nature of this task that kills spaces as soon as they are created.
The complexity that demands that spaces be self sustainable, and imagined differently that pushes us right to the edge of delirium. We look for different everywhere. Instead we find the same poorly imagined spaces. What then remains, but for us to look, demand and create?
Perhaps to support and imagine with. To let go of the idea that we, and we ourselves must be the sole proprietors of such spaces. And, if the goal, as it has always been, is carefree black bodies – then black bodies must be allowed to be carefree. And to imagine carefree – that’s a tall order. It makes more sense to allow for carefree and adjust oneself in relation to the shape that carefree takes.
To demand that we, like others, must be free.
Or that others, like us, must be free.
Because when it comes down to it, we must demand – demand – that we are creating our own freedom. For what is the point of breaking free if we’re only fashioning newer, tighter, cages? In the end our freedom will be the work of our hands. And that work – that work is all we have.