announcement time

i am the book writer

I’m very excited to announce that I’m writing a book for St. Martin’s Press, an imprint of Macmillan and a pretty cool place to land your first book. It’s weird and I’m very nervous and I’m having a difficult time with the stress, but not in a bad way. It’s a heavy subject, and I feel a responsibility to get it right.

I love the concept of History from Below, something that the scholar and writer Marcus Rediker emphasizes in his stellar work. But a history of the people must also include the spirit of the people, and I fear that the history of theology and its ties to various cultural sacraments has been ignored for too long in the realm of geopolitical analysis. The God Flower is a people’s history of cannabis, but a proper people’s history of cannabis must include its place at the center of spiritual traditions and anti-imperialist cultural movements. Associating the plant with the hippies is intolerable modernist bullshit; Anglosphere fantasies for coddled minds. I’d rather not contribute to that, so my book will focus on more interesting stuff. Stuff like the Mahdists, and the Ainu, and the Rasta, and His Imperial Majesty Haile Selassie and the Scramble for Africa that never actually ended.

Hope you’ll read it. In the meantime, I’ll be reading, researching, and writing.

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Lenape Landrace #23

when the waves thrash my children

they think it is funny

but i think about drowning.

how do you measure complicity?

i am on lenape country.

i am eating lenape corn, 

cultivated over generations.

my children say it is sweet.

was the Mahdi John Brown

or was it Muhammad Ahmad?

can the Lion of Judah ever die?

what a silly thing to wonder about,

but i do wonder about it often.

the waves haven’t stopped for

as long as anyone can remember.