Who would you be if you knew nothing but love?
Turning towards hope, Saida Agostini, and the worlds we make for one another
🗓 Coming up:
✨Sat 22 June at 4pm: Writing Together Celebration on Zoom
Link at the bottom of this post. ✨
The poem I’d like to share with you today is Saida Agostini’s incredible ‘black aphrodite entertains a mortal lover’. You can read it and hear Agostini reading it at the link below.
I’ll leave you to enjoy this poem and invite you to return here for the discussion and Writing Invitation:
https://poets.org/poem/black-aphrodite-entertains-mortal-lover
Agostini writes:
“Who would I be if I knew nothing but love? This poem is one response to this question. In a time when Black women and femmes across the globe are so constantly reviled, ignored, or objectified, imagining a world that actively loves me as I am felt revelatory. It came in response to James Baldwin’s edict that we must always turn away from despair. This poem finds a fat Black woman reveling in her love and pleasure, turning from any gaze but her own. It is a prayer of sorts, a reminder to keep turning toward hope, a remembrance of the worlds we make for each other.”
Imagining a world that actively loves us as we are. That’s not so easy to do, for far too many of us and for far too many reasons. But when we turn inwards towards sensation, when we sense into what we need and want, perhaps there’s more wisdom waiting for us than we realise?
I love Agostini’s lines: ‘I am fat with love / freedom has made me bigger.’ Her Aphrodite fills me with hope: ‘I want to be known for nothing but me… tell that to history.’
We began seven weeks ago with writing ourselves into our soulskins and now we’re here in the messy, wild, Marvin Gaye filled house of this gorgeous, ‘vast and ordinary’, ‘fat black happy’ goddess.
This week, we’re bringing together everything we’ve learned so far about knowing and loving ourselves through our writing and our living.
Writing Invitation
Who would you be if you knew nothing but love?
Close your eyes, feel your body supported by the surfaces that it touches. Take some time to sense into that question: Who would you be if you knew nothing but love?
And some questions that may be hiding beneath that: What matters to you? What do you want next? What do you long for? What brings you joy?
When you’re ready, you can create a character – goddess, creature, mortal, tree, whatever kind of character you need – whose voice you can use to tell us about these things: what matters to you, what you want next, what you long for…
Who will you be when you know nothing but love?
You could write down some fragments now.
Next step:
‘if you can remember nothing else
know I am happy in this ugly little house…’‘…I never worry about who may pass by
to witness the blessing of my flesh all
purple and growing’
What house will your character – the you that knows nothing but love – create to write in as you move forward? Experiment now with building it on the page.
What does that house of writing look like and feel like?
How will you live in it, dance in it, write in it?
What does your house need in order for your body to be able to move in and call it home?
You could begin with Agostini’s line: If you can remember nothing else…
Tell us everything we need to know.
It would be naive of me to suggest that, if we love the world, it will always love us back, but I think some writers are really good at reminding us of the importance of loving ourselves and one another. Sometimes that means not giving a damn about the housework. Sometimes that means getting together on Zoom and writing together.