Writing with Juliet Iwelunmor

Our LIGHT festival just ended. I was supposed to close and inform people about the plans for next year. I didn’t. I couldn’t. Our last speaker, Christell Roach lost her grandmother, Dr Ivis M. Richardson yesterday. She could have cancelled, she could have called and told us about her death. We would have understood. My grandmother is dead and I remember vividly how I felt that day. Yet, Christell dropped everything, even her grief, for an hour and created a community with us in a tradition of witness. That hour will perhaps be the most powerful for me now. It stands to show why what we are doing here at LIGHT matters. We are building community and like Christell would note, we resist things that bring division to communities. Public health to us isn’t about the papers you read or the conferences you attend only. It isn’t about the research you conduct only or the theories you practice only, however great they may be. For us it’s is about people, how we gather, how we heal, how we belong, how we even die. It’s about us as a community, working together to build spaces and place that are healing. The meeting ended with me sharing this quote from Christell.

“Love is our tangible eternity, if we are doing something we love, it will last.”

Thank you Christell for the reminder and may the soul of your grandma remain in perfect peace. Amen. See you next year and read below what I should have read but couldn’t and instead I am grateful I didn’t because it enabled Christell to have community even in her grief. This, this, to me is the Public’s Health.

A friend reminded me the other day about how light attracts dust, attracts things hazy, yet as light, remains unusually clear.

So much so that when you are in light and with light and through light, all things will be clear.

This is what I hope the past two days have taught about how to drive meaningful change with the public leading health their way.

Let me also close with these lines from Lucille Clifton, that it is hard to remain human on a day when hunger, genocide, homelessness, poverty, sickness, and greed, is robbing the public of the health it so desperately needs.

It is hard to remain human when we are living in times when birds perch weeping, squirrel eyes do not look away, and even dogs look at us in pity.

It is hard to remain human when many of us are trying to understand if what we know as public health is truly in service to the public or to the experts who wear their credentials and speak often to each other alone.

Yet what we have seen in these past two days, the stories and poetry, the arts and workshops, all we have seen and heard, from gratitude to dance, a tradition of witness to building trust and community through lived experiences, even with films as tools for impact, all of it has shown that this too is the public, this too is public health, with the public leading the way.

So and still channeling Lucile, we have seen how the public can gather together, seen how we can have a sense of place with writing or gratitude with mindful painting.

We have clustered all this together with dance as an interrupter, speculative fiction and care work for story telling after the empire, we learnt how to use storytelling for social impact, figured why a tradition of witness matters and now as we close, we hope for the public, for the public’s health, no matter how complex and messy it may all seem for the times we find ourselves in, that through the struggles, we add a little love, a little flower, for all the ways the public still wants to walk unannounced, into what we know is public health and blossom there.

They did that beautifully this weekend that still channeling Lucille, all praises to our audience, all praises to the public, all praises to our sponsors, all praises to our speakers, all praises to our builders, all praises to our planners, all praises even to Zoom, praises to Alexis, praises to Idia, praises to Light team members, praises to all of you in attendance again, to the impossibility that is light, to the presence you all give to us to remain true to ourselves and with no further ado, say hello to Issue number 2….

Thank you for the public intimacy that is our light festival and see you all next year. We hope Light remains a space you can go to experience freedom, and radical dreaming about the public’s health.