Loam Loves: May
Viva Wittman on Everyday Alchemy & Liberatory Lit
PHOTO BY AMBER CAIRES
Loam Love is a series within our Substack. Each month, we share a curated missive from one of our contributors on some of the perspectives and projects that are shaping their current praxis.
This May, we’re sending you some sweetness from writer and dancer Viva Wittman. Viva has proofed many Loam publications as well as is Loam Co-Editor Kailea Loften’s little sis! We love when Loam really is family.
WHAT I’M READING
I just started a new release called Ours. It begins in the 1830s, in the southern and midwestern US, when a powerful and mysterious woman leads masses out of enslavement to form a community magically concealed from outsiders. Like I said, I’m still at the beginning, but I know from reading a little about it that it taps into the nuance of what it means to be free, to be safe, and to be protected by a fallible individual. It’s by Phillip B. Williams—who, aside from being a talented novelist and poet, was one of my favorite professors in school.
One of the classes I took with him was called “Afro-Futurism and Black Horror”. In a rickety little room of an old barn at Bennington College, he led discussions on the work of Toni Morrison, Octavia Butler, Saidiya Hartman… It was in this room that I learned the word “robot” is derived from the Czech word for “forced labor” or “slavery”. This wasn’t a route I’d imagined at the time to connect horrors so distinctly human to the sleek polished façade of such advanced technology, though since then I’ve come to recognize that that which often appears immaculate likely hides unseen labor. (But more on that some other time.)
Afro-Futurism and Black Horror make for good teaching partners because of course to build into the future we want, it’s necessary to pay attention to the horrors we’ve endured. We’re all told time and again not to let history repeat itself, but we still let it! This isn’t to invalidate heroic activism—carried out most notably these days by students, journalists, and other individuals in the face of current genocides. But god, how do we make it stop? How do we learn/unlearn toward liberation? There’s too much grief here to neatly tie up this paragraph. But I’ll say it’s the most impactful art that makes us ask ourselves these questions.
Dipping into Ours, the potency of that class I took several years ago now is all flooding back. The work is steeped in a precise but ecstatic sort of mysticism, and there is such a compassion demonstrated toward its characters. I mean, Phillip’s reimagining of an alternate future which branches off from a point almost 200 years ago…I just feel lucky to experience it. I can’t wait to see where it goes. I bet I’ll be surprised.
WHAT I’M LISTENING TO
Segundo by Juana Molina. And I’m laughing a little imagining what esteemed Loam co-editor Kailea Loften (AKA my big sister) would think of it. To be clear, it’s a really, really cool album. But I think my taste in music often skews a little weirder than Kailea’s. Actually, our brother Izé introduced me to this album, thinking I’d like it, I guess, for its twangy synth style, hypno-melodic soundscapery, and that dog barking in the background of the third track. He was right, I love it. And wishing to speak Spanish is far from actually speaking Spanish (I don’t). So the lyrics are impossible for me to follow, which makes the album great to write to.
More great writing music:
Going Steady by North Americans. It’s like if noise music had a baby with an enchanted forest…or something.
Eghass Malan by Les Filles de Illighadad. This girl band from Niger has oomph! Their voices will raise the little hairs all over your precious body. Kailea likes them too.
I’ve also been listening to Robin Wall Kimmerer read her book Braiding Sweetgrass. Every day with her voice in my ear, I learn something new: like how plants want to be harvested, growing more robust by respectful tending, and how the land really loves us back. About that, it’s not a metaphor. It’s a conclusion drawn by noting its trend of loving behaviors—how it nurtures us, protects us, encourages our growth… If you don’t see how plants could understand love, then I don’t know, maybe think about whether you can really understand it either. Speaking of Kailea, I know this is a book she loves and comes back to often. I can see why.
WHAT I’M STILL GRIEVING
What with war and climate disaster and social injustice, it can feel really fucking hard to feel into a healthy future. I grieve every paycheck for its taxes that help fund the genocide on Palestinians. I grieve the loss of the Lahaina fires that left a gaping, smoldering wound on my home island. I grieve the overturning of Roe v. Wade (which just now I aptly mistyped as Woe v. Raid). But maybe I’m misusing the concept of grief, because I’m not going to reach acceptance on any of this.
WHAT I’M PRACTICING
Alchemy?? Not in a ritual sense, but in an everyday sense. I don’t know, I just keep thinking about how I feel like I am able to take in a lot of dark and heavy shit and still put out light. It’s a gift a lot of us have, and I’m now just trying to see it that way—as a gift that can be harnessed.
My grandma, whose death I really am still grieving, always loved to tell me this story: When I was around four, she heard me talking to myself one day. I was saying, “I make people happy. I make people feel good.” This is a pretty self-involved story to repeat, and it always made me embarrassed to hear her tell it. But now I see it as such a gift that she reminded me, again and again, of a time she witnessed me feeling adored by the world. I have a lot of blessings, and I would just really like to use them to help other people feel good.
So when I say alchemy, I mean I’ve been trying to participate in alchemizing darkness into light and discord into tender listening. Alchemy is such a singular sort of word, so it took me by surprise when my EIC Ariel McCleese at Bloodletter Magazine adjectived it in our mission statement. Bloodletter is a feminist horror magazine and community which, in Ariel’s words, “is bonded by the alchemic capacity for storytelling to transform horror into liberation.” That’s what I’m talking about! Darkness isn’t going anywhere; without it we wouldn’t have light. But I love seeing folks get thoughtful about processing and wielding it. It’s everyone’s responsibility.
For me, the day to day practice of alchemizing darkness looks a lot like me just seeking to be loving to whoever I come across. People are going through a lot. I have compassion for that.
WHAT I’M TENDING
My coworker Izzy gave me some trimmings of her snake plant and told me how to propagate them. Now I have this really sweet snake plant on my dining room table, and it’s sprouting new growth which is all bright green and fresh and adorable. I love it! I think it loves me back.
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