making home: introducing rituals for mourners

[This post was originally shared via Substack here.]

The truth is I don’t want to start a substack. I don’t want to send you love letters through this template-ized VC-coded platform. ideally, you’d be here next to me; I’d pull flowers from my pockets and tell you about the stars. if it had to be digital, I’d text you, let my reflections flow through rambling bubbles. it breaks my heart a bit you’ll receive this as an email, in a substack compilation or as its own email, sandwiched between a notification from your bank and a marketing newsletter from a store you don’t remember subscribing to (maybe once to get a coupon?). 

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on digital homes and being a renter

this contemplation of how you will receive this newsletter is a result of two things: one, how delicate these words feel, how tenderly I wrap this package. these are whispers of my becoming.

and, two, my obsession with overanalyzing the design of digital interactions. we know all design is political. substack is not a platform I feel represents my politics. It feels cringe, contradictory, and complicit to share my offerings––my wanderings and wonderings toward desire and liberation––through an interface that platforms white supremacists and champions of capitalism.

worse, I fear to you this becomes just another substack. this is not to delegitimize the value of the many stunning substacks out there ( Zeba Blay’s Carefree Black Girl, Ayana Zaire Cotton’s Seeda School, and ismatu gwendolyn’s Threadings. being some of my favorites). instead I mean to question what happens when platforms give us five fonts to chose from? When they wrap all of our writing in the same corner radius? these are visual design details I point to, but I’m gesturing towards something below the surface, beyond the interface. when we deepen our reliance on a handful of platforms to maintain our relations, we perform their choreographies. we limit our ability to improvise, to author how our bodies move and flow together, online and on land.

In a way this is a tangent, but it also is an introduction. 

this dispatch, Rituals for Mourners, is a newsletter of field notes exploring the grief and joy of radical, queer, diasporic home-making across physical, digital, & social planes. meaning, through meditations on my daily life and silly little wonderings, i will question the politics and ceremonies of the digital worlds we inhabit. particularly, I’ll be interrogating how these digital homes — the rooms we make on social platforms, the studios we set up in digital tools, the colors and images we select as backdrop — how this all connects or estranges me from you and us from each other. 

for now, I am making home in substack. I’m arranging the furniture and setting the dinning room table. I’ve invited you over. please come sit with me. ignore the bland airbnb-esque design. this is a temporary residence. a container that can hold us, can bring us together. this is a landing place for us to start. truth is I’ve tried to start a newsletter before and I’ve always gotten stuck on negotiating the interface — how will I send it? how will it look? how will they receive it and what do these decisions signify? I refused to give myself permission to just start, to release a draft, to let something out that’s still a bit ugly.

I’m starting a Substack; it’s a little cringe, a bit contradictory to my politics, and lacking in design, but it’s feasible, it’s here, and I’m practicing. maybe I’ll save up and get my own place soon, and we’ll have another house warming on a platform somewhere else.

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living within lineages: all within a name

for now, we’re here, and I haven’t even introduced myself. chances are you know me (I’m not planning to share this too wide quite yet. again ! delicate </3), but I recently changed my last name and it warrants re-introduction. I’m Raya Marie Hazell. (also sometimes raya marie hazell. I’m still figuring out my relationship to capitals. I know its a queer artist cliche to use all lowercase, but I have too many short letters in my name that I feel like the leading caps stand out as so harsh and it creates this weird symmetry I find a bit displeasing.) i’m an artist, designer, grief facilitator, wandering being….

ABOVE: Family archival photo of my (grand)mother, Jacqueline (bottom center), with her mother, Marie (top), and siblings, Donna (left) and Doug (right)

there’s a lineage in a name; there are three mothers in mine:
Maud Ray. Marie. Jacqueline. 
Great great. Great. (Grand)mother. 

and there’s a story in my name change: the departure from Ward, a stepping away from a male assertiveness, that harshness I feel in the capital letters, a name proximate to achievement, award, recognition. Hazell is a retracing, a reaching for and honoring my many mothers, the brown and black and racial indeterminate women that have always been with me, in my name, in my body, in my politics. this name and this newsletter mark a moment of rewriting. this dispatch is a way for me to directly narrate and document this world of mine, this world through me, this world in me. within this, I will practice ancestral remembrance and collaboration — a venturing through the guiding wisdom of black feminists politics and queer theory. here too, I will reach for my mothers; I will dig into the grief, that deep personal and existential mourning that I hold tenderly with me, that I carry in my name, that you call me by.

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the fear that my desire will reveal my madness

last week my desire erupted from me and in it I saw my fear.

I fear my desire will reveal my madness. that in living deep in my desire will show how far I have wandered, how deeply i have transformed, how wild i’ve become. I fear I will lose some attachment to reality that is necessary for my financial, social, or physical security. like always I am craving safety —home — which time and time again, life reminds me I must make for myself. and so I will, I will make a home for me (for us). I will invite you in and ask you to sit with me, to dine and look at all the colors. 

I am fearful to reveal myself. In bite size pieces my madness may be alluring, interesting, curious. but what will you do when i sing it out in prose? when I tell you, really, where I am in this world? If I invite you into my home, will you notice the altars? what do the books I carry reveal about my psyche? 

I’m currently (re)reading:

• Against Purity: Living Ethically in Compromised Times;

• How to Go Mad without Losing Your Mind: Madness and Black Radical Creativity (slowly & continuously this one);

• The Black Period: On Personhood, Race, and Origin (this one, again);

• If Beale Street Could Talk.

ABOVE: The Black Period by Hafizah Augustus Geter is a book I continue to carry with me, hauling it in my suitcase across borders, even after finishing. I’m in awe of the way Geter collages poetry, history, political theory, and memoir into jaw-dropping prose.

I worry what it would mean to practice in the open like this. to think aloud. I fear confusing distant friends, weirding out my clients, inviting in judgment. mostly, I am excited to honor my practice with the gift of an archive[1], to recognize my research: the way I am in constant practice of this being. and I do this in public not for attention, but for collaboration, to invite you in. I’m scared, but reminded by Ayana that the only way to cultivate safety in this space is to practice inside it.

so here I practice: practice starting, practice sharing, practice inquiry, practice being in public, practice making home.

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more soon, 
raya 

FOOTNOTES:

[1] An affirmation from a session of Ayana Zaire Cotton’s Seeda Treehouse, Discover Your Weekly Dispatch