Nyasha Williams: Writing Unedited & Raw
Thoughts & Feelings in Black History Month 2024
For Black History Month, I was asked by one of my publishers if I would be open to writing the introduction to a Kid Lit e-newsletter for February 2024. The KidLit newsletter is geared toward librarians, booksellers, and teachers. Generally, these letters tell a story-behind-the-story or give a peek into the author's message or process (why they chose to write their book, what about the topic fascinates them, what message they felt moved to share).
I was asked to highlight my book, Keep Dreaming, Black Child, in the newsletter intro. I wanted to share the original unedited first draft with my community.
Kid Lit E-Newsletter by Nyasha Williams
Being both an educator and a creator are two of the most important political positions one can hold in society. Both careers are at the core of possibility, showcasing and imagining all that can be. We are aware that literature, media, and the characters we encounter on our screens and in the pages we read impact our lives. We fall in love with them, laugh with them, cry with them, and grow older with them. They help shape who we are, who we aspire to be, and how we view the world. They contribute to the social, political, and aesthetic transformation of culture.
Here, I live with my work as a griot, activist, and weaver - in the depths of creative resistance.
Black creativity has always been a pillar of life and culture in America. From hiding symbols of Yoruba, Igbo, Akan, and Fon religions in Christian iconography to singing of a liberated future in negro-spirituals, Black individuals have used creativity to carve out spaces of love, healing, and humanization. It has served as a means of resistance against systems built to restrict and cage our freedom.
Black art has shaped and shifted American culture, calling out societal ills and sparking movements for Black joy and liberation. By creating spaces where Black creativity can flourish, Black individuals, communities, and collectives can assert their agency and contest the white gaze, fostering an environment where their expressions and imaginations can thrive.
These spaces allow artists and beholders alike to revel in the richness of Blackness. In challenging societal norms and amplifying own-voices, creativity can shift the narrative, dismantling untruths and creating a world where Black bodies can rest instead of fight. Through these acts of resistance, Black creativity becomes an integral part of the fight for liberation for all.
Creative resistance is one of the most visible manifestations of collective liberation.
While "art-ivism" in children's literature is crucial for young readers, it is equally vital for adults to engage with these stories. As adults, we are not exempt from the need for gentleness and radical transformative fierceness that these narratives offer. It is work that strives to balance warnings around human negligence and moving in stark individualism, with the belief that situations can be improved, the power in collective action, and socially just and regenerative world solutions.
Neither children nor literature can be extracted from politics. By default and sometimes by choice, children are drawn, for better or worse, into the world created by their caregivers. While children's literature receives some of the highest levels of critique, it is a necessary realm of critiquing the existing world order and utopian visions of Afrofuturism and solar punk dreamscapes.
I call for an era of unapologetic representative works of art, media, and literature and a society willing to promote, engage in, and uplift these works. I support everyone getting into good trouble – fighting in the ways that play to their strengths towards a regenerative, decolonized, Indigenized, and liberated world.
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