Friday, 25 July 2025 → Busy Being Black has been on hiatus since December 2024. The reasons are legion, but like many people around the world, I have felt uncertain that my particular effort is big enough to meet the violence, the despair and the loss of life that we are called to bear witness to. In communion with friends, elders and a mischievous cabal of spirit guides, I have been reminded in beautiful and important ways that a system that extracts, murders and discards does not produce metrics worthy of our tender and enlivening work as artists, poets and storytellers. We do not aspire to monstrosity but to magic. Ours is a tradition that precedes and will survive the cannibal horrors of our time. Ours is a tradition that interrupts the bland bleating of our politicians and their charlatans. Ours is a tradition that refuses silence. Our job is to bear witness in ways that remind us who we are and what else we are capable of. The Surrealist philosopher René Ménil believed the primary task of the poet is the pursuit of the marvellous, which only ever appears when it has to: it is not a coincidence that the artists, poets and storytellers among us are activated at a time of such protracted violence. We document, we remember and we enchant. We help ensure surviving is “more than just a technical thing.” So, mobilised by an anger that will destroy me if I don’t use it as creative energy, Busy Being Black is back in production and will return soon with an exploration of the fecund world-building that takes place when the Black imagination and the terrific emotions that fuel it are let loose. What I am learning so far from stonemasons, painters and poets is that a pure and primal force pulses just underneath the surface of our reality. Our task is to surrender to it. We can trust it to become our fire and fury and freedom.

Josh Rivers