Lit Fest Makes History Of The Future

Professional poets, emerging authors, scholars of Black literature, and kids learning to sound out words collectively transformed the Q House into a story-fueled time machine at the third annual Elm City Lit Fest.

Saturday’s Black literature festival centered around the theme of ​“Afrofuturism”: the possibilities of a Black future liberated from colonialism and racism. Children pored over novels of utopian worlds, writers offered portals across time and space, and musicians sang past boundaries of genre and culture.

“I wanted to center on the theme of envisioning our community for ourselves,” said festival organizer IfeMichelle Gardin, who founded the parent organization Kulturally Lit. ​“For us, by us.”

This effort to imagine a future of Black empowerment entailed ample attention to the present and past. Artists and attendees alike revisited narratives of historic heroes and wondered about how their future selves and descendents would remember their current experiences.

“I’d love to make history at the Q House,” said Terry Ritter, a Dixwell resident who had wandered into the Stetson Library earlier that morning to use one of the printers, yet wound up staying for hours at a festival that made her feel like part of something monumental.

Ritter delighted in a mask-making craft station, where she created three pink feathered masks for herself and one king-themed mask for her husband. She immediately donned one of her masks, bedazzled with her nickname ​“True Pink Diamond.”

Meanwhile, a panel discussion on the second floor of Stetson Library featured Frederick Douglass Knowles, who has served as Hartford’s poet laureate for four years. Knowles recited original poetry that imagines encounters between the living and the dead, remembering people from the past through a kind of magical glitch in time. 

One poem recalled his grandmother’s death at the age of 101, which occurred when Knowles’ daughter was pregnant. The poem imagines ​“the conversation my grandmother and granddaughter were having at the crossroads,” Knowles said. 

In the poem, he describes ​“poking praise into cinnamon skin, moving to music not yet written.” By the end, he declares, ​“I reap the harvest of hallowed dreams.”

Another poem focused on Henrietta Lacks, a Black woman whose white doctor harvested cells from her cervix without her consent — cells that became known as ​“immortal” for their ability to survive and reproduce endlessly. Lacks’ cells paved the way for foundational medical interventions and continue to be used in medical research. Knowles’ poem focused on some of Lacks’ ​“immortal” cells that lived in the Norwich medical building where his grandmother received treatment for his cancer.

“We’re gonna be history in a short period of time,” Knowles reflected. ​“When our [descendants] scroll back to early 21st century history, they’ll want to know what we did, what we thought, how we acted, reacted.” 

The poet’s job, he said, is to record that history in its fullness — not only for the living, but for the yet-to-be-alive.

Forging New Narratives

Downstairs, an array of vendors filled the Q House gymnasium. Some included writers and artists who used their mediums to process their own personal histories.

Rosamond White manned a booth for an independent publishing company, Lauren Simone Publishing House, which had published White’s first picture book.

An immigrant from Antigua and Dominica, White now works in Human Resources in the town of East Hartford. Outside of her day job, she’s the author of a burgeoning picture book series following a pair of children who visit their family on various Caribbean islands. In the first installment — Home, Where Is Home? — protagonists Malachi and Karelle discover a sense of home on the island of Marie-Galante, where their aunt lives. 

The books were ​“something I’m bursting to share with the world,” White said. She wants to help children and adults alike ​“understand where they come from,” she said.

Across the room, Shameeka Hill stood by a set of original colorful and textured paintings, while her two young kids doled out business cards with enthusiasm to vendors and customers around the room. 

Painting has helped Hill heal from an emotionally abusive marriage, she said. ​“A person doesn’t have to put their hands on you to hurt you,” she said. ​“Once you get out, it gets better.”

She’s seen her own work reflect, accidentally, her emotions about her past relationship. The painting featured on her business card features a trailing stripe of spongy red and yellow cutting across a blank wall of black and gray. The painting made her notice her own anger. ​“It’s like a fire,” she said.

The set of vendors included local independent booksellers like Possible Futures and BAMN Books, which sold Afrofuturist texts alongside classics from Black writers.

A Chance To Dream

In the early afternoon, BAMN Books’ Nyzae James took a break from her mobile bookstore station downstairs. She arrived upstairs in the Stetson Library to moderate a public conversation with Joel Thompson, New Haven Symphony Orchestra’s composer-in-residence, who wrote a piece stitching excerpts of James Baldwin’s essays into a musical narrative of the writer’s legacy of political resistance. 

In moments throughout the talk, Thompson recited Baldwin’s words by heart. Thompson offered one passage to the audience that ​“represents a deep seated prayer that I have that America will be what it should be.” He repeated from memory a part of his favorite Baldwin essay, ​“No Name In The Street”: 

The representatives of the status quo are sickened and divided, and dread looking into the eyes of their young; while the excluded begin to realize, having endured everything, that they can endure everything. They do not know the precise shape of the future, but they know that the future belongs to them.

Geeking out about Baldwin’s writing, the pair discussed how art can be used to both disrupt and preserve present-day political dynamics. Nyzae asked Thompson about how he conceives of the relationship between art and activism.

“It can be easy to put on the costume of an activist” without substantively working for change, Thompson said, noting the pressures of established institutions and the ​“capitalist machine.” 

Tyler Jenkins nodded his head. ​“How do you navigate making art knowing that Black pain is gonna be monetized?” he asked Thompson toward the end of the talk.

A musician and aspiring composer, Jenkins has been reckoning with that question himself. He thought back to musicians who wrote songs about police brutality amid a wave of Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, and the criticism some received that they were profiting off of the social movement. It’s confusing to write about injustice and pain while knowing that ​“you’re getting praised for this work,” Jenkins reflected later.

Thompson responded, ​“there are ways to use the art for good and for evil.” He noted that one of his most famous works, ​“Seven Last Words of the Unarmed,” which memorializes the words of seven Black police brutality victims, was revolutionary at the time of its debut in 2015; he recalled that an audience member once ripped up the program in protest in the middle of a performance. Still, ​“there are other people taking the piece in an opportunistic way,” using it superficially to diversify their programs, and ultimately ​“cosplaying our trauma.” He tries to intervene when he sees that happening, he told Jenkins.

In this moment, Thompson said, there’s a ​“voracious appetite for our trauma. What’s revolutionary is my joy.” 

In 2022, he’s trying to compose music that focuses on moments of clarity, sweetness, and wonder. American culture often focuses on Black ​“luminaries of the past” and ​“trauma of the present,” Thompson said, but ​“very rarely do we get a chance to dream.”

Outside the Q House, the autumn sun beamed on festival goers’ picnic blankets. Children sprinted through the grass. A poet-singer-songwriter who goes by Erycka performed verses and songs on the stage. 

“I’ve danced through the dark with fluorescent lights beaming through the empty space of my hips for most of my life,” she read.

Latasha McClain watched her grandson make new friends — and put her dreams of a better future into concrete terms. ​“We need more affordable housing in this community,” she said. ​“We need more education on vaccines.”

Meanwhile, union activist Stephanie Greenlea sat with her six-year-old daughter Zora on a blanket. ​“This is her first literary festival,” Greenlea said, referring to her daughter. It probably won’t be Zora’s last.

They had just purchased a set of books from the vendors inside. Zora kept a notebook beside her, where she writes about her friends and draws pictures, she explained. But her attention was focused on one of her new books: Shuri: A Black Panther Novel.

“Finally — Chapter 2!” Zora exclaimed after a moment. She turned the page.