"Open to the World . . . "?

Why does that frighten me so?

I've often wondered why I'm afraid to look people in the eye, to look at surroundings, when I'm out alone in public. Having even one other friendly person with me there alters that equation.

Why? Am I not a big girl? A big feminist girl? A big Marxist-feminist girl even? Sixty even? A mother even?

Somehow I feel in the interview below and the marvelous book it connects back to (see marvelous gorgeous book cover below), there are some answers.

What spaces are, for me as a brown woman, spaces haunted by histories of violence against, of the oppression of, my kind? Public space is haunted by living memory, public and private. We tend to see it as unmarked, anonymous, and historyless, when it's not. It’s SO not.

Space lives, space remembers.

Here’s Sonya Lea interviewing the writer Irvin Weathersby in The Rumpus:

https://therumpus.net/2025/01/06/irvin-weathersby-jr/?mc_cid=8f6b536707&mc_eid=1d05686072

Tell me if it doesn’t give you the chills. Or don’t tell me; I know it will.

Happy Reading.