Writing with Juliet Iwelunmor

If my work ever became a houseboy, allowing people to enter a party to which they had not been invited, I would stop.

If I speak my mind eloquently, determined not to be distracted, yet discover that I only attract dust, I will stop.

If what I do is not owned by whomever wanted to take possession of it, I would stop.

The next step isn’t a step.

That would be inappropriate, somehow like glue to hold together pieces already drawn from other sources together when we are already whole.

If at the heart of the problem are questions about my work and their rightful place, even if they may seemed subsumed by my presence, I would always and I mean always question, what made  me the type of researcher that I am today.

The quest for me, to put the public in health, is serious, always been serious, and will be serious. I begin this debate not as a researcher only nor as the public only, but as both.

My position as a researcher and a person who understands and feels what the public, anyone may feel about their health, those of the people they know and love, all of it help to deepen and expand the argument about the validity, necessity and pace of our work today.

My own is not to stay in protected turf or spaces, even if they were new or unique, radical or disruptive.

Mine is to remind everyone where things fall apart, tell stories of ways we need not confine ourselves to ourselves.

We exisit in every notion of what it means to struggle, all our hopes and triumphs, from the framing of who we are to the moments we become like the earth, everything is about our access to knowledge, this privilege of our freedom.

All of this is why playing in the dark with the public’s health will never serve us well, if we don’t begin by being direct.

So let me begin by sharing here that I am who I am and nothing will ever change that. We are like a miracle, our being, our presence, even that saying what the enemy meant for evil, personifies us to the fullest. So if you are the big tree as Bob Marley once noted, we are like small axes, sharp and ready. This to me is the next step. Being light in world truly dark.