Writing
Most of these texts are from undergrad/law school and aren't very good but maybe you'll find them interesting! Writings associated with performances or audio essays are in those respective parts of the website. In the future I hope to write more as accompaniment to other creative projects and to expand on some of the ideas in my radio shows, especially on my family's religious and political history & oakland's radical history of mutual aid networks.
law-related writing
"Contemporary Organizing Against Gendered Violence in Mexico City: Implications for Transnational Movement Lawyering" » an ethnography of the mexican anti-femicide movement based on my travels there in 2021, including interviews, political art, & an analysis of the movement through an abolitionist framework.
"Law On the Street: Learning from the History of Mass Protest Defense" » an extensive historical analysis of political defense efforts in the United States, from “law communes” that provided free legal representation to anti-war protestors and Black Panthers in the 1960s to the decentralized legal collectives defending anti-globalization protesters at the turn of the millennium to the coordinated networks of attorneys representing Black Lives Matter protestors in 2020, including interviews with attorneys and activists.
"pleasure is the point!!" » a meditation on adrienne marie brown's concept of pleasure activism and its connection to my mental health challenges during law school, written as a part of yale's disorientation event.
"Black Nativism, the #ADOS Movement, and the Law – Implications for Race-Conscious Organizing and Legal Reforms" » a critical analysis of the "American Descendants of Slaves" movement and the rise of Black xenophobia in the Trump era.
Movement Lawyering Reading Group Syllabus » Reading list and syllabus for the Movement Lawyering Reading Group I led in 2021 - providesbackground on the concept and suggested readings & activities for those who want to learn more.
old short creative writing
Petition of 1788 for the Abolition of Slavery in Connecticut, by Enslaved People of New Haven
gentlemen
wee are
Dragd
from our native Country
for
Life lyis
Cruil
Slavirre
Leving
our mothers
our farthers
our Sisters and
our Brothers
is this humen peaple
**
further morgentlemen after
wee have Ben
and fought
the grandest Battles that
has Ben fought
in this War
the greats part of us -
We and
our children and
our Brothers
ar takend By
fose of vialince
and carred whear
thay Suffer
an Addisanl
Sufrans
wher wee ar
Beaten
and whealmed
with Out Eni
Cries
or with eni
Law
**
Gentlemen will is this to
Be Rite
and justes
is this a free contry
No
it murder
____
Adapted from:
this text.
re: coming home to roost
Subject: coming home to roost
To: joan.macintosh@yale.edu,
cc emily.coates@yale.edu
Date: August 1st, 2022
Dear fellow classmates from performance and the moving image,
I’m on a plane right now leaving new haven for california and am feeling wistful thinking about our final performance together, so I thought I would tell a little story that reminded me of you.
For this past year, every tuesday and thursday as our class came to a close, I would cross the street and climb 11 floors up the parking garage overlooking the city. In those twilight hours i’d watch the greens and browns of the hanging hills meld into the reds and oranges of the fading light, watch the moon rise through the church spires, peek into the private worlds of the art studios across the way, and rest.
That garage was a place of solace and repose in some of my hardest moments in law school - i was there the day my housemate Bob died, the day omicron sent us back into lockdown, through job rejections, panic attacks, breakups, & all the tiny devastations inbetween.
Through the cold winter, I was almost always alone up there, bundled up with blankets, occasionally with a maintenance worker sweeping nearby and looking on puzzled.
As winter turned to spring and we closed the curtain on our final performance, I kept up my ritual, Tuesdays and Thursdays at sunset. Below me the unfurling of magnolias and excited chatter of regalia clad grads, but up here still quietness, emptiness.
Nothing seemed to change up there until Easter, when I exited onto the roof & found myself joined by 10 or 15 others, all facing away from the sunset, patiently in wait.
I watched the sunset as I usually do, alone on the other side of the roof, lingered a moment in the fading twilight before turning back towards the exit. I nearly would’ve missed it if it wasn’t for the sound, distant chirping & an impatient flutter. A hundred or so birds, swirling right over the heads of the folks on the other side of the roof. stretched out like a tornado towards the sky, then dissolving in every direction into an inscrutable swarm. Dozens more appearing every second from the ashes of the sunset, flying in to meet them. Swelling to more than a thousand, their collective chips slowly drowning out all the other sounds of the city. A dance like ours, teetering at the edge of falling apart, moving from choreography to intuition and back again, so close to our heads we could hear the swoop of their wings.
It was beautiful & I was terrified, replaying in my brain the end of Stephen King’s “Birds” & my past two bird attacks (a story for another time).
Eventually the swirling magnified and migrated across the street to our rehearsal studio, making another cyclone now four times higher than the rest. A brief moment of steadying, and then the birds dove down as one into the chimney, swallowed away like nothing at all. so many at a time into such a small space that it looked like magic. Within 30 seconds, every single bird had disappeared, and the city was silent again.
I stood there stunned with my mouth gaping as the other watchers made small talk with each other. "Pretty cool, right?" one of them said to me, and I responded with a half-hearted nod. "What... What was.." "They're chimney swifts," he said. "They stop here for a couple of weeks before migrating north for the summer. We've come here 8 years or so - who knows how long they've been around."
The crowd died down over the next few minutes; once I finally composed myself, I shot down the stairs and across the street, fumbling around the dark studio to try and find the chimney. Eventually, through the fire exit next to a costume room, I saw a long staircase going upwards towards a door marked "furnace". And over the mechanical din, I heard the same 'chirp chirp' I had heard just before. I walked up the staircase and pensively grasped the door handle, afraid that the thousand or so birds might file through the door at any moment. Perhaps for the better, the door was locked. But even just the small glimpse I could catch peeping through the keyhole was enough to know that the magic was real.
In the weeks following this first excursion I began sharing the magic of the swifts with others. We blindfolded my friend and brought him up for a birthday surprise. My whole family joined after our graduation dinner, and I traumatized my 10 year old niece, scaring her off from birds perhaps for life. Each time the performance was totally different, with the chimney diving as the sole constant. I couldn't help but feel like each time I went up there I was looking on at one of our classes, watching the process of collective world building slowly unfold as we each brought in new pieces of ourselves and our surroundings each week.
Back at home, I did some vigorous googling on the swifts. Apparently, it's physically impossible for them to perch on any horizontal surfaces, so they fly almost continuously for 18 hours a day and find something grippy and vertical to hoist their nests on at night. Tree trunks hollowed out by lightning are their preferred habitat, but chimneys do just fine, too. With all the old industrial buildings out here, there is a long history of these displays in old New England towns.
Outside of these few weeks of roosting every year in late spring, the swifts scatter all over the country, alone or in groups of 3 or 4. I couldn't think of a better metaphor for the process I've gone through so many times of making art and building community together in a university setting. It's always sad that just as things are falling into place, we inevitably must disperse. But there's also something beautiful about the fact that we all carry a piece of each other in all our far away places, and in the knowledge that this place will always exist for us to roost, to perch, to swarm in those moments between our long seasons of restless flight.
_____
Yesterday, on my last night in New Haven, I went up to the parking garage one last time. I hadn't seen the sunset from there almost at all since graduation because of my bar study schedule, so I really had no idea what to expect. It was far past the season for the Swifts, but I stayed the normal 20 minutes after sunset, just in case. There was nothing for a long while, but eventually a few stragglers that had stuck around through July gathered up above, no more than 15 at most. They flew around with the same force and grandeur as when there had been thousands of them, then swirled as normal around the chimney. But just when I thought they were about to dive in, they shot out towards the horizon, disappearing west towards the glint of the sunset. This morning, I followed them.
They'll be back soon enough though, and so will we.
Little Spring
Woozy mesas in the Arizona winter
dew on humble rosewood glinting in morning light
roadrunners sprinting back to their enclaves
day’s dry and lonesome heat looming
Down in the valley, old saguaro skeleton
posing in Surya Namaskar
strong limbs skyward,
bleached
ivory-white and new
Sun at zenith smiling back –
bliss.
Gemstones hid all beneath us;
little stars like seeds planted by God,
squirming through harsh loam
waiting and wanting to bloom
We found some in the city,
swaddled them with twine
strung them around our necks
three at a time
Our desert was a fever dream
it existed only in heat, deep time –
scales that our minds could not understand,
our souls somehow knew
But this was real:
Your body next to mine, sun-kissed and tan, renewed.
I woke up to the light shining on your new necklace
kneaded it in my hands as your chest rose and fell
travel/personal writing
“The Iron Gut Ghan-tlet” - 24 Hours of Ghanaian Street Food (2016)
Let’s talk about food.
Right before I left for Ghana, over a conversation with a nurse at Stanford, I heard the advice I imagine everyone hears when traveling to a developing country: “DON’T DRINK THE WATER! DON’T EAT THE STREET FOOD! STICK TO RESTAURANTS OR COOK THE FOOD YOURSELF!” And, though I’d tried most of the local food (fufu, banku, jollof, palm nut soup, etc.) and pushed my culinary boundaries a little, for the most part I’d settled into a safe, steady rhythm – buy overpriced imported produce from the grocery store at the mall, throw it in the fridge at home, and cook basically the same as I would normally in the states. And even though I’d been eating comfortably, it still felt strange to eat things that were completely foreign to most people in the country. When I’d bring in some Middle Eastern stew I made for lunch at work, I’d have to spend 10 minutes explaining what a chickpea was to my coworkers; kiwi was met with incredulity and confusion.
All the while, I was learning more about how the economics of food in the country actually worked. Average income for Ghanaians, I’d learned, was less than $200, with public employees making only $2 – a huge number only spent a dollar or so on food each day, living almost exclusively on staple grains and occasional cheap local “bush-meats”. Which meant that I was spending more per day than most Ghanaians spend per week on food. And why? Out of fear of sickness? A desire for “a taste of home” in a foreign country? And what might I be missing out on by sticking to my quasi-American diet?
And so, through some combination of curiosity and guilt (and maybe a splash of masochism), the “IRON GUT GHAN-TLET™” was born. The rules were pretty simple – eat all of my food off the street for an entire day (with preference to nondescript “meat”), and see what happens. For extra fun, I also had to drink a full glass of tap water and eat unwashed vegetables at some point in the day. This past weekend at the Chale Wote – an alternative street art festival in the heart of Accra – it was finally time to put myself to the test. Here’s what happened.
12PM – Tap water: ★★★★☆
More water. Hopefully not tap water though
For much of my time here, water has been the bane of my existence. Like Ghana’s electricity grid, the water delivery system in the country is abysmal and prone to long outages, with pressure being too low for the taps to work most days without a backup system. As a result, I’ve had my fair share of bucket showers, and had to go out and buy water almost every day. The quality, too, is pretty bad – more than half of all the piped water contains dangerous levels of e. coli and arsenic, and more than 40% rely on even more dangerous surface water sources. Add in incredibly deadly and nearly annual floods that have killed thousands throughout the country (including one that happened just a couple of weeks before I arrived) and it’s pretty clear that Ghanaians have a rocky relationship with water.
So when I opened the tap at my place (which thankfully flowed this time) and poured myself a glass, I was pleasantly surprised. I’m no sommelier, but it tasted pretty good – perhaps a little tepid, yes, but no strong aftertaste and generally pretty refreshing. There might have even been a hint of sweetness too (probably the arsenic kicking in). Not bad, Ghana. 4 stars.
1PM – Unwashed Carrots ★★★☆☆
Vegetables in Ghana are … interesting. A huge array of produce is produced in-country, from starfruit to cauliflower to green beans, but because of transportation and infrastructural constraints, most in-country produce is of low quality by the time it gets to the major markets, and the majority of what people buy in the city is imported. All that’s typically available at traditional outdoor markets is peppers, tomatoes, onions and occasionally carrots. So after my glass of tap water, I grabbed some carrots I’d bought from the market and dug in. And they were alright! Definitely lacking in freshness and sweetness, and a bit soft and dirty, but edible nonetheless. 3 stars.
2:45 PM – Squid(?) ★★☆☆☆
Squid or not Squid -- you decide!
Finally at Chale Wote and starting to make my way through hordes of festival-goers with a couple friends from work, the world of nondescript meats and street food was finally exposed. A woman walked by with some orange-ish … something on her head. I asked about it and she mentioned it was squid. So I shrugged, threw down 50 cents, grabbed a piece, and threw it in my mouth. Extremely rough and rubbery and coated with some oily spice mixture, it certainly wasn’t my favorite part of the Ghantlet, and I’d venture there’s a 40% chance it wasn’t actually squid. 2 stars.
3 PM – Fresh Crabs ★★★★★
You know, sometimes I forget Accra is right by the ocean. Except for Tilapia and Snapper, there’s not much marine life in the Ghanaian diet, and the vast majority of housing is inland owing to the frequent floods and high level of pollution. So when I saw a woman with what had to be 200 or 300 crabs on her head down the festival streets, I was pumped. For less than 50 cents I got maybe 10 crabs, fresh and (hopefully) cooked. They probably should have been washed, and may have been a bit undercooked, but this is by far the best 50 cents I’ve spent on food in this country. If only I could have gotten crab-cakes too. 5 stars.
4 PM – Palm Wine ★☆☆☆☆
For those that might be familiar with my own “trash wine” escapades, palm wine-making takes about the same amount of care – find a palm tree, tap the syrup, and keep it in a bucket until it gets cloudy and tastes vaguely wine-esque. Because of this, I was told (even by locals) to be VERY careful about palm wine – it can spoil incredibly quickly, and is often prepared incorrectly. And so, of course, I went out and bought a large bottle of it as soon as I could find one at the festival once I was finished with my crabs.
I knew from the second I opened the bottle this wasn’t going to be the most pleasant gustatory experience. It smelled less like wine and more like super yeasty and vaguely spoiled apple cider, and looked like it had a big coagulated mass of bacteria on the bottom. It also tasted a lot like ham (I had a friend of mine corroborate so this is basically confirmed) with a really strong bitter aftertaste. I thought about this for a second – how do you get the taste of ham in a bucket of overfermented palm syrup? Did some pig come by and bathe in the uncovered bucket when the wine was being fermented? Did a ham sandwich fall in the bucket from an adjacent ham-sandwich tree? These are truly questions for the ages.
I guess what I’m trying to say is that wine should not taste like ham. 1 star.
4:15 PM – “Meat” (Chicken?) ★★★☆☆
So at this point my friends were all pretty amused with the idea of me trying my hardest to destroy my stomach, and were doing their best to identify everything that looked sketchy for me to go eat. They noticed some fried chunks of something that looked a bit like deformed chicken wings and pointed it out to me. At the point I was craving something, anything to drown out the palm wine taste from mouth, so I walked over and bought one, not even bothering to ask what it might be. We wandered over to a rap battle of some sort in this half-dilapidated building they’d turned into an art space. Thankfully they had some chairs where I could eat my meat in peace – and I sat right by one of the most well-known pop stars in the country (which I didn’t know at the time). She didn’t seem to appreciate the deformed meat I was scarfing down in front of her that much, and neither did I. 3 stars.
6:30 PM – “Meat Kebab” (Goat/Cat?) ★★★☆☆
With the sun going down and some of the major performances starting at the festival, I was finally ready for the final culinary challenge of the day: dinner. Or, more specifically, nondescript "meat" skewered and cooked on the side of the road. I was already told that these sorts of kebabs not expressly labeled as goat or gizzard could be just about anything, even cat or dog in more rural areas of the country.
A coworker (in apparently trying to convince me to buy more of these kebabs) had asked once if knew how to kill and skin a cat, how you have to lure it into a bag with food and hit it with a club until it passes out before extracting the meat. I told him about how my co-op paid $2000 to provide surgery to a chicken with an anal prolapse, and explained that we might be on slightly different sides of the animal welfare scale. As all this went through my head, the guy on the corner was moving between cooking my kebab and preparing some other stuff, touching raw sausage in the process. It took a painfully time for him to finish, and it didn’t seem like his grill was even working right. Possibly undercooked and almost certainly contaminated meat that could have come from just about any animal sourced from the side of the road – now this is what the Ghan-tlet was all about!
Once he finished, I grabbed some roasted plantain and popcorn for good measure – if this kebab was going to bring me down, I was at least going to eat well doing it. And I did! The meat, though still a little bit sketchy tasting by the end, wasn’t horrible compared to what I’d had at actual restaurants, and I didn’t feel like I was going to die anytime soon at the very least. 3 Stars.
And with the end of that kebab, so too ended my 24-hour journey into the Ghana’s street food culture. The food itself might have had its ups and downs, yes, but the experience was certainly one to remember. After the food I stayed for a concert at the festival and then hitched a ride back home with a friend, extremely satisfied with how the day went and, for the meantime at least, healthy and happy. With no stomach issues for 2 days straight, I’d thought I was home free, and labeled myself as some freak of nature that could withstand any food thrown in my direction. I was originally planning on ending this post talking about how my body and mind came to conquer the Ghantlet, and throw in some sort of cheesy metaphor about how much stronger our spirits (and stomachs) can be than we ever imagine before. I’d watched a lot of the show “Bizarre Foods with Andrew Zimmern” growing up – maybe I’d make a kitschy statement about we Andrews were all just kindred spirits.
Then the third day came and, with it, the moment everyone told me to expect. I was up all that night absolutely miserable with stomach pains and ever since then have had intense body aches and coughs (probably because of a messed up immune system from bad food). All the while, I’ve had the most stressful week of work during my whole internship, making it almost impossible to prioritize getting better. So maybe the more accurate moral of the story here would be something like this: You are what you eat. And I guess when you can’t even identify the genus of what you’re eating, it’s probably your own fault if you end up sick as a dog (Or should I say “sick as a non-identifiable animal whose meat is being sold at on the side of the road”).
Oh but crabs are cool though. Can’t complain about those.