Notes On the Grand Occasion of Turning 35
I turned 35 this April and I am in a very reflective mood. The notes in this piece discuss current anime watches like Naruto, the nature of black artistry today, and reading Toni Cade Bambara.
About two weeks ago, in the closing days of the Aries season, I turned 35 years old. This has put me in a rather reflective mood. Now that I am smack in the middle of my thirties, what do I want the rest of this decade of life to look like? How do I want to continue to challenge myself as a writer? How can I redefine success that focuses on the pleasure of the process and my own internal goals severed from the grind of capitalism and the incestuous, narrow-minded creative class that marks the profession I move through? How can I write in a way that speaks directly and impactfully to the communities that matter to me? How can I make the lives of those I love easier and sweeter, especially against the backdrop of the climate disasters and fascist politics that are fucking with our lives in fundamental ways? These are all questions I have been mulling over.
But while this piece starts personally, the notes are rather wide-ranging in order to discuss various artworks and events that have been on my mind. This newsletter goes down some fun alleyways and discursions. It considers everything from why Naruto: Shippuden is mid at best especially compared to the other shonen anime that is exciting me these days, the ways non-black people who should know better than to extricate blackness for its creative cool whilst treating actual black people as incidental, and how reading Toni Cade Bambara’s essay on Daughters of the Dust helped reaffirm as well as ground me in the reality of why I write as a black woman. It’s a weird, wild, and hopefully life-affirming newsletter. Enjoy!
1. The first gift my mother ever gave me was anger.
2. I know my mother doesn’t see it this way. She would probably insist that the first gifts she granted me were beauty and poise and a flair for the dramatic. But all these gifts are second to anger; an anger born from witnessing my mother nearly killed by my father at age four. It is my first memory. It is my earliest spark of righteousness. It is one of the many reasons control is an obsessive preoccupation of mine. If horror can flow upon your doorstep from people meant to love you and keep you safe, what is a young girl supposed to think of the world beyond her home?
3. It is only at 35, after years of rancor and disagreement, that I can see my mother for who she truly is. A wounded woman committed to the beauty of life despite all the evidence of life’s cruelty.
4. My mother has bestowed upon me many gifts: A love of classic R&B and neo-soul, a deep love of my own blackness, an understanding of how diverse blackness can be thanks to growing up in Miami surrounded by her working women friends who hailed from places like Haiti and Ghana, a belief in the profound nature of simple pleasures, an understanding that a meal can be a link to a past we yearn for but can otherwise never return to, the ability to throw the fuck down in the kitchen.
5. I was blessed with the opportunity to see my mother at the beginning of April when she was celebrating her own monumental birthday. I hadn’t seen her in almost two years. (A lack of) Money is constantly thwarting us. But being in her presence was a balm. To hear her lilting laughter, to see the way she infused kindness and perhaps apology into her minute actions. We have come such a long way. It is hard to imagine my mother will one day not be on this earthly plane. Whenever she leaves this mortal coil I know she will take a part of me with her.
6. As a child my brother would pray that he could take years off his life and give it to our grandmother. She would finally pass in 2021. But my mind keeps reeling back to my brother’s prayers. Can such prayers ever be answered?
7. Seeing my mother earlier this month brought such light in my life. Her voice often grounds me in the truth of myself. What I wasn’t expecting was having to face my mother’s mortality. Given that she had spinal surgery, she walks much slower and needs help doing certain tasks. For example, she still can’t bend down which means making the bed or picking something up that falls to the floor is an impossibility. There are many things I feel the world doesn’t prepare young people for as they enter adulthood. None more than the roiling emotions that come with realizing just how human your parents are and the cataclysmic nature of understanding on a molecular level that one day you will no longer be able to hold them close. This is the sweetbitter nature of being alive. Everything changes. Nothing lasts.
8. It is because of the tricksy, slippery, all too brief nature of life that I move so fiercely through the world.
9. Pleasure is my discipline.
10. The pleasure of reading books in bed with my lover. The pleasure of a raw East-coast oyster slipping down my throat. The pleasure of watching a movie I’ve never heard of before and feeling as if I saw a piece of my very soul reflected to me on-screen. The pleasure of an intellectually dense argument with someone I respect. The pleasure of cracking a story. The pleasure of walking down Humboldt Blvd on a 75-degree day in Chicago. The pleasure of the first and last bite of the Key Lime Hibiscus with Blueberry compote pie from Spinning J. The pleasure of a French 75, with cognac instead of gin. (That’s my signature cocktail.) The pleasure of being in a creative flow. The pleasure of the ache that comes after an intense workout. The pleasure of playing with my beloved cats. The pleasure of my lover whispering in my ear. The pleasure of my loved ones laughing. The pleasure of my own laughter — as I dip my head back, expose my throat, and laugh with embodied joy. The pleasure of supporting my communities, in protesting in support of Palestinian life, in bringing my politics to bear in every facet of my existence. The pleasure of living each day fully, no matter how hard that may be. The pleasure of being the black woman I am, of Creole and Dominican heritage who grew up in the South and brings the rhythms of such an upbringing into my every step. The pleasure of just being.
11. I have been reading Deep Sightings & Rescue Missions: Fiction, Essays, and Conversations by Toni Cade Bambara, an essential and powerful work that is enrapturing to read. I was particularly struck by the essay Reading the Signs, Empowering the Eye: Daughters of the Dust and the Black Independent Cinema Movement. Bambara covers such a wide range of topics and films so deftly it has inspired me to be more playful, more bold in my structure, language, and approach to writing essays. To say this essay astounded me is an understatement. Reading the essay was a stark reminder of why I do what I do as a black woman and writer. Peep this excerpt:
“The Black insurgents at UCLA had a perspective on film very much informed by the movements of the sixties (1954 - 1972) both in this country and on the Continent. Their views differed markedly with the school’s orientation:
accountability to the community takes precedence over training for an industry that maligns and exploits, trivializes, and invisibilizes Black people;
the community, not the classroom is the appropriate training grounds for producing relevant work;
it is the destiny of our people(s) that concerns us, not self-indulgent assignments about neurotic preoccupations;
our task is to reconstruct cultural memory, not slavishly imitate white models; our task leads us to our own suppressed bodies of literature, lore, and history, not to the “classics” promoted by Eurocentric academia;
students should have access to world film culture — African, Asian, and Latin America cinema — in addition to Hitchcock, Ford, and Renoir.
12. I will be printing out this Bambara manifesto-list as a reminder and clarion call whenever I feel lost as a writer.
13. More than anything else, I write for my people and black women in particular. Not only those alive at this moment in time but especially for generations to come.
14. Bambara’s words feel especially cutting to read in an era marked by the belief that art is merely entertainment and that we shouldn’t ask artists to speak for something more than just themselves. Consider the ways Beyoncé fans get into formation whenever anyone brings up her lack of comment on Palestine or the queasiness of the cover of Cowboy Carter; she’s so eager for black people to be a part of the American project and to be feted by the white establishment that denigrates her, like the Grammys in particular. Given the storied history of black musicians using their craft to speak to their people and make political stands, are y’all not embarrassed to defend artists on such grounds? Art — whether we’re discussing music, film or otherwise — has never just been entertainment. To demand it to be such reflects a limited imagination, to say the least.
15. My friend, Maya Cade, shared on her stories recently a Jet Magazine article from 1970 in which Aretha Franklin shared her thoughts on potentially paying Angela Davis’s bond, “I have the money, I got it from black people — they’ve made me financially able to have it — and I want to use it in ways to help our people.” This is the responsibility and power of the black artist. Are y’all not embarrassed to tell exceedingly rich artists that community investment doesn’t matter and their success on the grounds of representation is enough progress for us that there is nothing else they should do?
16. I have been musing on this topic for quite some time, especially within my book proposal. Let’s get deeper into it. Black is cool and always will be cool. But black cool has always emanated from the ground level. Poor black folks crafting color and beauty and curiosity into their lives. Remixing, adapting, inventing. The black stars we have today no longer feel indebted to the black community. They’re not involved in radical spaces, outreach, or even believe that they have an extra weight they must consider with the work they do. They want the shadow of what black cool represents. Now representation and their celebrity presence is seen as enough, as if it creates meaningful change alone. Because of this, these stars are completely disconnected from black people on the ground. This has led them to cannibalize blackness until whatever coolness that remains is a copy of a copy of a copy.
17. Is this at all a surprise given how thoroughly Hollywood (in reflecting the United States of America as a whole) has returned to whiteness?
18. On that tip, I’ve been writing and discussing Zendaya a bit lately. Zendaya is the only star of the younger set with true power in the system that happens to be black. It isn’t a coincidence that this is the case considering her thinness, lightness, and her lack of intimate relationships on-screen and collaborations off-screen with black people. For Vulture, I reviewed Challengers, which I found mid. I wrote in the review, “We’re all starving for legitimate adult dramas with charismatic performers that neither talk down to the audience nor are skittish about the complexity that comes with being grown. But Challengers plays like an intriguing diversion from all that starvation that ultimately leaves little impression. The details of these people’s lives and their interiorities are so thinly drawn they feel more like beautiful ideas crashing into one another and leaving little messes that are too easy to clean up.”
19. The even spicier opinions ended up landing in a conversation I had with Matt Zoller Seitz — that Madeline Leung Coleman for The Critics newsletter facilitated — that also dropped on Vulture yesterday. I said shit like, “Sensuality is really hard to play, and we are living in a very un-sensual era in general. I think people are feral, horny, and sad, and they’re not getting fucked. And I can tell by their movie taste.” No matter where you fall in terms of Zendaya as a star, it’s a rich conversation.
20. But while I will always bring careful critical understanding to the nature of black art, black artists, and blackness in general, I have also been thinking a lot about the ways blackness is stolen from and belittled by non-black artists as well. In tandem with this country’s return to whiteness, the belief that blackness has worth to be extricated whilst black people don’t matter in such an equation is still wildly in style.
21. I recently listened to the Film Comment podcast’s recent episode on Frantz Fanon and Fanonian, radical cinema. The hosts/editors interviewed Adam Shantz, a white Jewish writer who wrote a biography on the revolutionary thinker. “The American poet Amiri Baraka described James Baldwin, who was born a year before Fanon, as “God’s Black revolutionary mouth”. What Baldwin was for America, Fanon was for the world,” Shantz wrote in the work.
At one point when asked about his interest and thinking behind writing about a subject far from his own racial and ethnic experience, one whose work is a cornerstone for Afro-Pessimism and radical black thought he said, “When you think about it, that’s not un-Fanonian is it? Fanon wasn’t someone who stayed in his own lane. I may have Jewish ancestors but as a writer I haven’t focused on […] topics that are considered Jewish concerns.” It’s a strange conversation in which Shantz utilizes his Jewishness to create a link to Fanon but also as a shield. He absolves himself of community responsibility. He’s talking about blackness to shore up his cultural status but doesn’t seem all that interested in blackness beyond what he can extricate from it. Shantz describes A Spook Who Sat By the Door as a “whacky film” in which every character black or white is a “stereotype”. Keep in mind during this conversation that blackness as an operating lens, experience, and lived reality is incidental. It comes across as if he’s using Fanon for his own ends rather than considering the black radical tradition. When was the last time a black writer/scholar and their work was treated as an expert on whiteness? Why is blackness to be studied and taken from but actual black people are incidental to such an exercise?
22. I don’t want y’all to think my intellectual and emotional life is dominated entirely by heady considerations. Alongside musing over black artistry and the nature of mortality, I have been watching a fuckton of anime. Thanks to falling in love with a man so about that life he has a One Piece tattoo, I have received a stellar anime education over the last year and a half.
23. Right now we’re watching several anime series together. We’re currently deep in Naruto: Shippuden as the characters are mired in the fourth Great Ninja War. When we jumped into the OG Naruto I was coming in with little knowledge of the show beyond it being considered in the Big Three of anime given its importance in the shonen canon. Watching Naruto was not a fun experience. I would have dropped the series if my partner didn’t insist on me giving it a shot even though we were both finding it tiring. I bitched about the lore, the structure of the show, and especially the flagrant misogyny which rears its head especially with Sakura, who is framed as a main character yet treated like trash. But several people told me to keep rocking with the franchise as Shippuden is a marked improvement as a continuation.
24. Shippuden begins as a much stronger and narratively refined series. This is especially evident with Sakura. She’s been mentored by current Hokage, Tsunade, she’s a well-versed medical ninja who even saves Kankuro’s life, and she can beat some ass. Her fight alongside Granny Chiyo against Sasori is a marvel and honestly one of the best fights I’ve seen in Naruto. You would think this would lead to a greater sense of interiority and more narrative complexity for not just Sakura but for other women on the show. But Naruto creator, Masashi Kishimoto has a reputation for sexism in his work for a reason. After this arc, Sakura returns to being a thinly drawn, boy crazy fool who cries more than fights despite being a ninja. I’ve seen a lot of Naruto fans compartmentalize the sexism of the series. Sure, it’s a problem but the rest of the show hits, they say. The fuck it does! The sexism in Naruto as a franchise spills into every aspect of the show. Interesting avenues are foreclosed because of this. This isn’t a minor problem but one that undermines the entire series leaving it feeling mad uneven. But this isn’t its greatest problem. Watching Shippuden I realized Sasuke — who is so central to the emotional life of the series and its action elements as well — fucking sucks.
25. Look, I can love the brooding bad boy with a heart of gold in a shonen series. One of my favorites is Hiei from the mid-nineties series Yu Yu Hakusho. We watched Yu Yu Hakusho late last year and I was transfixed! Hiei is a great example of getting this archetype right. A powerful demon boy whose heart is wounded from his horrifying beginnings and his purposeful distance with his sister who doesn’t realize his true identity. The key difference is his heart. Sasuke in Naruto doesn’t have much of one.
You can tell Kishimoto is partial to the character because he needs to get his shit rocked and face himself more clearly which doesn’t actually happen. Sasuke is the kind of bitch who thinks he’s the only person who has truly suffered. But considering how many people have lost loved ones, the routine occurrence of war, and the vicious nature of this world, it’s kinda wild the show doesn’t take him to task for being so myopic and self-involved.
Sasuke also doesn’t deserve Naruto’s unending friendship. After a certain point I started to wonder why Naruto keeps putting his life and soul on the line for someone who only treats him with cruelty and is willing to side with the Akatski for his own brutal ends. Once you learn the truth about Sasuke’s older brother, Itachi, it becomes all the more glaring how uninteresting Sasuke is. His brother has far more depth and intrigue with far less time in the show. Why are we meant to exalt a boring asshole like Sasuke?
26. Sasuke is a crucial issue for Naruto, without a doubt. But there are other fundamental problems. Like, why do the heroes have such caps for their abilities and chakra usage while the villains seemingly have unending energy with no limitations? Why are the fight/action sequences structured in a way that saps them of energy and clarity within the rules that have been established for this world? Why are the villains kind of a bore after a certain point? Like, Obito/Tobi can’t touch Orochimaru and his silk press!
27. Naruto is an outlier in my anime watching. It’s the only thing I am currently going through that is pissing me the fuck off. On the other hand are series like the dark fantasy shonen epic, Black Clover, and the delicious Food Wars which are utterly delighting me. There’s been a lot off-the-beaten path anime works that have rekindled a sense of childhood wonder and emboldened my curiosity that I am hoping to write about in the future. Namely, Blue Submarine No. 6 for its medium pushing artistry, considerations of the Earth’s climate disastrous future, and gorgeous score. As well as, The Vision of Escaflowne a fantasy mecha anime that I feel puts the likes of Evangelion to shame by virtue of its layered characterization, aesthetically profound design, and its impactful consideration on the nature of war.
28. Watching The Vision of Escaflowne — whose opening credits song by Maaya Sakamoto, who was a teenager at the time she was also voicing the dynamically sweet-natured lead character, Hitomi — I couldn’t help but think of my younger self. The versions of me that have come before — the emotionally scarred child, the goth-metal head of my teenage years, the reckless twenty-something — are sometimes difficult to face. But in many ways, I write for the girl I once was who was so desperate to connect and mired in an all-consuming loneliness she turned to the page to survive. What would those young girls think of the woman we’ve become? I think they would be proud.
29. In the year leading up to my 35th birthday, I had several intriguing moments occur in friendships I have with women younger than me. Women who are in their mid-to late twenties, others just turning thirty. These friends kept making odd comments about being over thirty, in general, and my age specifically. I can tell they’re afraid of aging. I keep coming across younger women who seem alarmed by getting older and pathologize age for the rest of women as if we must shirk from the light so it won’t reveal just how old we really are. Getting older is a fucking privilege. Being 35 has just the right seasoning. I feel empowered. I’m hotter, smarter, and sweeter than ever. I would never go back to being in my twenties. It sucks that my early thirties were eclipsed by the pandemic. But I am loving my bodacious, glorious self more than I ever have in my life. I love the woman I am. Please, don’t give into the patriarchal condition that tells you you’re worth far less as a woman as you get older. It’s difficult to let go of the lies society feeds us about aging as women. It’s a continuous battle, to be honest. But still. Embrace age, don’t run from it.
30. I won’t pretend that life is easy for me right now. I am struggling with intense health anxiety, my body recalibrating after getting off of Lexapro, financially supporting my mother, navigating borderline personality disorder whilst trying to remain an engaged friend, a loving partner, and a badass writer who meets her many deadlines. But for the first time in my life, I can say without hesitance or caveats, I truly want to live. So, I will cherish this life of mine, infusing sweetness and care into all the spaces I move through, into the relationships that matter to me. No matter how heavy the wounds I carry happen to be, I am happy to be here in good health and open to the wondrous possibilities that come from being alive. I can’t wait for what beauty and lushness this new year of life has in store for me.
Life has been tricky in the financial department since I am moving to a new apartment at the beginning of July and I am continuing to support my mom since she doesn’t have regular work and is in physical therapy since her spinal fusion surgery that occurred a few months ago. If you want to send me a birthday treat or you’re just feeling moved to since you enjoy my work, my Venmo is @/angelicabastien. Thank you for engaging with my work and I hope life is treating y’all gently.
“We’re all starving for legitimate adult dramas with charismatic performers that neither talk down to the audience nor are skittish about the complexity that comes with being grown."
I haven't seen Challengers, but this is something I think about a lot. Sometimes I wonder if our standards for film have been lowered after the pandemic, as well as the arguably lesser "star system" we have today.
"Getting older is a fucking privilege. Being 35 has just the right seasoning."
As someone who's more or less around that age, I'm really happy to read this, so thank you.
I loved this recent newsletter, almost reaching the same age as you, really made me take a step back and do a bit of reflection on my self, it was a little scary though haha. I was intrigued reading about your anime dive. Have you watched "The Woman Called Fujiko Mine" and "Dear Brother..." (Oniisama e...), having followed your writings for a while, I think you'd also enjoy those if you haven't already watched.