Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie & Ta-Nehisi Coates

Well. Two of my FAVORITE minds in the same room, both talking about identity, being black in America (as an African and an African American), and other timely, relevant — will they ever not be? — race-related topics. 

I walked up Ninth Avenue (past yet ANOTHER one of Edgar Allan Poe's houses, this one is where he supposedly wrote The Raven) the other week to an event at Columbia, part of a series in the Oral History Masters Program that I find absolutely fascinating — reading Alan Lomax and hearing his old recordings of all those Delta Blues musicians is (1) the reason I fell in love with the blues, (2) the reason I spent a week in Mississippi on a road-trip I once took, and (3) one of the finest examples of audio preservation that I know. Anyway.

The event was called A History of Echoes: Sounds of Trans Freedom, and for a couple of hours, we watched videos and listened to a magnificently compelling speaker talk about identity in the trans community, the silencing of narrative, and the struggle to be heard. He used the word "invoice" like I'd never heard it before — not as anything pertaining to a transaction, but as in-voice, a verb I took to mean the insertion of real, true voice into an otherwise silent or closed-off space. Feminism, too, is sometimes described that way (that is, the fight for women to be equal, to be heard). And in a project I'm working on for the Voice of Witness series, every voice — every story — out of Ferguson, Missouri is clamoring to be heard. Not told, mind you — in fact, one of the things that has damaged Ferguson the most has been the "storytelling" of that wonderfully theatrical fly-in media — heard.

Immersing myself in these subjugated worlds this year has been shaping in ways I can't even begin to describe. I shuffle between jadedness (a similar hopelessness that you get from Coates about everything: from our politicians to the continued dominance of white supremacy) and optimism (the best of which I read in Rebecca Solnit's Men Explain Things to Me).

Regardless, there's nothing like hearing candid discussion on difficult topics from brilliant minds. You have that here in spades.