Writing with Juliet Iwelunmor

We live, my family and I, in a village surrounded by trees. Almost all of them are naked and bare in winter. When the days are cold and the wind pushes only cold air, these trees stand confidently, only shedding dead leaves and branches unable to survive the air, they breathe.

There is a red maple tree in front of our house. Nothing seems active with this tree. Not its leaves or its branches. A winter rest is in full effect that I can’t help but do so for myself this year. Everyday, another glimpse of the tree, surrounded by the coldest air, reminds me of why we rest in winter, wrapping ourselves truly with only things that matter. My mind is naked and bare. More confident than ever in my worth. My heart is open and free, as things dead, slowly shed away from me.

This bareness, the enormity of shedding everything, while still wrapping one selves with things that matter is the reason why I look towards these red maple trees at the beginning of the year. Everything it needs for its rest is within its reach. Things it needs to produce, those it needs to inhibit, all are active and gradual in a period where nothing is as it seems for a tree completely naked and bare, yet wrapped in a perfect picture of serenity and confidence so blessed. The falling leaves, the breaking twigs, it’s as if they were telling stories of their own, those remembered and faithfully repeated, whenever cold air plays its tunes again. We have been here before it’s say. Confident, naked, and bare. Boundaries secure, nutrients intact, everything looks dormant on the outside but rich and full within for trees that know their worth, trees that know they matter, trees that know too how to live in rest and abundance for themselves. Afterall, nothing is ever as it seems.

This new chorus of a naked self, like tiny hallelujahs for a discovering self, are the reasons why I refuse to be broken like a branch this winter. Claudine Gay, Ada Adimora, I pronounce your names and push it out through my throat naked and bare for all they ways you were neither broken nor afraid, into your own, for the sake of your own. We have expected more from these spaces. Afterall, we have been here before. We have neither expected to be naked nor dead. We had expected to be visible, open, eloquent, alive. We had expected more than these spaces. We have neither expected be to only be naked nor dead.

Still, here we are. These words I write here are just a reminder of all the ways we will take your names and your spirit, wrap them around us this winter, despite the cold air and harshness it gives. We will wrap your names around us, all of us black and women, and in academic spaces, we will wrap your names around us, so you live and we live and you live again, like the red maple trees we all are, confident, naked, and bare, even now in the middle of coldest winter.