So what's the plan

something's gotta hold on me

Hello, and welcome to yet another edition of The Black Cat.

To read what you missed this week in Good Black News, click here. Otherwise, this week, we are talking about The New Year.

Feel free to send it around, email me your reflections, and follow me on Instagram at dominicmadori.

This month I’m reading: The Secret History by Donna Tart and Weep Not Child, by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o

This weekend, I can’t stop listening to: NEVER WANNA LET YOU GO by Bren Joy

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💢From the Chatterbox💢

A year ago, all I had in my kitchen was lemon pepper seasoning. I had no clue how to cook and I was just lazy.

It wasn’t until I spent a holiday in France that I was introduced to the creative arts of cooking, and it wasn’t until I splurged on a fancy schmancy cooking ingredient subscription that I became obsessed with finding new ways to make food fun. I had to take random ingredients like rose honey and mushroom salt and turn them into something intriguing. Something that made me look forward to getting up the next day. Something that made my mornings, afternoons, and nights more interesting.

A lot has changed in a year. Now, I host dinner parties and cook crazy dishes like harissa eggplant, lemon-smothered pork chop, and basil salmon. I make up recipes, don’t follow measurements, and walk to the beat of my own drum in the kitchen. It’s become a new solace, and every day, a new adventure. It’s just another thing that makes me wonder what this year will bring as I enter the final few years of my 20s. I remember almost seven years ago when the decade for me first broke, how anxious and confused I was. Clarity has come over the years, but the anxiety has not quite gone away. Each day, it seems as if nothing passes but then when you look back, everything has changed. Almost ten years ago, Donald Trump was first elected into office. I was a college student at the time, and I anonymously wrote a now award-winning play about how as artists, we must put to use our pens and paintbrushes to fight back against oppression and tell the story of our time. I wrote the play as a way to help me cope at first with the election and even started reading The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus, though I never finished the book.

Now, I’m older, and a bit calmer, I must say. I read the headline of a New York Times piece about how Black women are resting after the election results. I didn’t feel like finishing the story. I imagine subconsciously there is a reason why I’m writing again, why I’m devoted to becoming delusionally consumed with the arts this year. Suddenly I’m back where I was in college, believing that the arts play this grand role in our society, to both tell and shield us from the reality out the window. That’s why I’ve fallen into cooking I guess, as a way to spend hours for no reason in the kitchen crafting elaborate dishes — the art of mixing spices, of new olive oil, of mushroom salt.

In some ways, this is a form of escapism. A trauma response to when events are too much for the mind to process. At the same time, it’s a form of protection. It truly is a shield from the constant stress of processing and reacting to this world, which has always been in such a state of chaos. Social media has made all these events seem as one, but even before such times, the world, though more fragmented, went through states of disarray that only later we put together as events of the epoch. That brings me some solace, always going back to that one James Baldwin quote along the lines of You think your pain and heartbreak is unprecedented in the history of the world, and then you read. It goes back to what I wrote in my college play. About the importance of not what happens but how one responds that is what makes or breaks the man. For me then, that was writing and for me now, that is writing. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive, Baldwin said in the rest of his quote.

Perhaps that’s why I’ve felt more at peace than I’ve ever felt going into this year, ramping up my reading. I would encourage everyone to put down the nonfiction books for a while (and you can tell when someone only reads nonfiction, too), and pick up some fiction. Reading fiction has made me a better storyteller, a better thinker, and a better person, really. I think the arts are safe spaces for what has always been a violent world out there. Last year, I tried to escape to physical places, and place value on physical things, but nothing felt complete. This perhaps truly is my year of rest and relaxation, as it was not my body that needed rest but my mind from the constant barrage of madness around me. So I look forward to the pottery classes, the pasta classes, the sip and painting classes. I’m going to the opera for the first time, and I’m seated back in the theatre.

I’m excited for this year and what it brings, which might sound odd to say given the uncertainty and anxiety the next years will bring. But perhaps it is because I have found a guaranteed path to solace. We spend so much time online, so much time in this virtual world where soon AI will take over and nothing will be real. I want to be less online. I often think of that Toni Morrison quote that said Your real life is with us, your family. I change it to fit my liking, Your real life is with us, out here in the real world, with your friends and family. Online has made us mean, unloving, and isolated. I reject this and the misery that has come from being surrounded by so much hate.

So I’ve decided I’m going to write again, I’m going to explore my own mind again. And therein lies the excitement (for me, at least) of awaiting what this year will bring.

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💫Kitty Talk💫

Here are some interesting articles I’ve read since we last met:

• The Financial Times, “The coming battle between social media and the state”

• Washington Post, “‘No one has a home’: What fire took from one California neighborhood”

• The Wall Street Journal, “We Grew Up Hating Cottage Cheese. Now We’re All Eating It.”