There is beauty and life and other heartening themes, as Milstein hopes for in the prologue, sewn into these stories. Sarah Schulmans The Gentrification of AIDS, excerpted from her book The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination, makes sharp and complex connections on the epidemic and the rapid gentrification of cities in the middle of it.Īlso, how the severity of that battle has largely been erased, and how people with AIDS friends, coworkers, presidents, landlords.Īrtist David Wojnarowiczs tumultuous epic Postcards from AmericaX-rays from Hell, written a few years before he died of AIDS, recounts a kitchen table commiseration with a friend about AIDS, then yanks the reader around mourning lost friends, anger toward the government and societys rampant homophobia (and complicity), and on.Īnd anti-imperialist activist David Gilbert, interviewed by Dan Berger, discusses his organizing efforts that led to a peer education system about AIDS for fellow prison inmateswhat Berger describes as a stark example of a revolutionary commitment to confront state violence through a transformative politics of care. The stories of those who made it through help keep them going, too.īut the darkness and movement seems to be coaxing me toward some sort of ending, if not any sort of real conclusion.
In Dust of the Desert, Lee Sandusky writes about working in direct aid in the harsh, hot Sonoran Desert, through which people try to cross from Mexico into the United States. Its a lack of feeling for another that is our problem, Rankine writes.
When we instead open ourselves to the bonds of loss and pain, we lessen what debilitates us we reassert life and its beauty.įollowing Hart, Claudia Rankines The Condition of Black Life is One of Mourning goes deep into the deaths of Emmett Till, Michael Brown, the six black women and three black men killed by Dylann Roof at Emanuel African Methodist Church in 2015, the four black girls killed in the 16 th Street Baptist Church bombing in 1963, and others, noting the dangerous ways the white imagination views black people (black bodies), historically and presently, as property and subsequently three-fifths human.
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