Are you sure, sweetheart, that you want to be well?
That quote by Toni Cade Bambara1 hit me like a rock. It was last Thursday and I was participating to an online conversation between Bayo Akomolafe and Erin Manning for Schumacher college2. The discussion was about whiteness, modernity and other burning and fascinating questions - when suddenly, this quote - in the form of that question - was pronounced.
I was mesmerised. It was like a revelation, like a relief, like something else too. It was as if I was holding my breath for too long and at that moment, at last, I could let the air.
Release.
Quick. A paper. Note the reference. Who said that? Find the whole quote. Note it down.
“Are you sure, sweetheart, that you want to be well?… Just so you’re sure, sweetheart, and ready to be healed, cause wholeness is no trifling matter. A lot of weight when you’re well.” Toni Cade Bambara, The Salt Eaters
∞
To further accommodate the reading of this post today, some ingredients of your story will be needed. For that purpose, please provide:
-1 piece of personal heartbreak (finely chopped and left to marinate);
-Perversity ground through a meat grinder (watch your fingers and nerves);
-Peeled childhood traumas and lost memories (you’ll find these in any cupboard);
-As filling: any defrosted journal you wrote when you were a teenager will do (to be whipped to consistency);
-Season with spicy music and sweet dancing;
-A pinch of poetry and fiction to taste.3
∞
Despite some bright days, despite all the lessons learned and a solid work accomplished, often, I find myself back at ground zero.
I claim nothing. I seek nothing. Just achieving the simplicity of a day, a line that goes from morning to evening seems more than enough right now.
I know, this is small.
I know, this feels hopeless and dark.
But this is all I am able to provide.
Outside the world is falling to pieces. Don’t you see?
∞
The only thing that really matters to me today is that my daughter is alive, that she can breathe, that she is not in pain every day, that she stays connected (to herself and to us and to the world) and that she loves learning new stuff (in school and also on her phone!) and that she smiles. Sometimes. Some days. She breathes. She is alive.
I am alive, barely breathing.
Finding joy and rest in the most simple things. Going through one more day. One day at a time.
∞
I am here to tell stories.
I write simplicity. I write days. I write despair and grace and joy and grief and hope. In the hope that my stories might come back to me as a spark in the dark.
Stories on things broken, mended, secret, mysterious, individual, collective, messy, interrelated and entangled;
A collection of writing and artwork that gives me purpose even if it is small anthology of the collapse.
An anthology of bones, blood, stones, roots and leaves; of birth, growth, sickness, healing, death, disappearance and renewal; of circles, cycles, nights, mornings and dreams; of porosity and guardianship and boundaries and spells and all the spaces in between.
∞
There is undoubtedly something, a yearning, an ideal, that runs through me and makes me breathe, makes me write, makes me create art, makes me take the next step.
A substance, undeniably, runs into my veins and make me wake up in the morning and go to work and function, lets say, more or less.
Is it blood ? Is it my soul´s mission on earth? Is it my ancestors providing me with the necessary vital force to achieve yet one more thing ?
Is this a blessing or a curse?
∞
My relationship with reality was constituted by a father who has always been some kind of a fictive character, brilliant by his absence and monstrous by his passive aggressive tendencies to the world, and a mother who has made her life an incredible and grandiose fiction to protect herself from a cruel reality. This way, I find myself in the perfect position to write a story.
My story is the story of a mourning, of a lost world, of a fiction. The fiction I am producing to continue to breathe while I am haunted by mourning.
∞
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toni_Cade_Bambara
Here the video of the talk if you feel tempted to watch it.
The recipe is heavily inspired by a text in the programme of Black Box Theatre. You can find it the original text here: https://blackbox.no/en/oslo-internasjonale-teaterfestival-2025/