Creativity as History in the Present Tense

Creativity as History in the Present Tense

“What to call the thing that happened to me and all who look like me?

Should I call it history?

If so, what should history mean to someone like me?

Should it be an idea, should it be an open wound and each breath I take in and expel healing and opening the wound again and again, over and over, or is it a moment that began in 1492 and has come to no end yet? Is it a collection of facts, all true and precise details, and, if so, when I come across these true and precise details, what should I do, how should I feel, where should I place myself?” Jamaica Kincaid, In History.

One of the readings for a class that I co-instruct is In History by Jamaica Kincaid. The above is the opening few sentences of that essay. For me, Kincaid’s questions are equal parts reflective and unsettling. And they raise more questions. For instance, whose history? Whose truth is being told, and who decides what counts as “history”? History, as I have come to know it through my schooling, is usually always presented as facts. It is often thought of as the only truth, with little to no room for questioning. Yet, if we really think about it, history is shaped and told by those who have the power and privilege to record it and decide whose stories get told and whose are forgotten. For those of us whose ancestors were enslaved, displaced, and/or colonized, history does not sit neatly in the past. We carry it with us through life. It is a wound that has never fully closed and truthfully, it will never be fully closed.

But what does it mean to live under the weight of history?

Living Under the Weight of History

For the enslaved, displaced and colonized, history was less about remembering and more about erasure. Entire systems were designed to ensure that what came before would be forgotten. Think languages, stories, and entire ways of knowing and being. To colonize was to create a new world order. It was to dismantle and to rewrite, with intention. It was to draw borders, change names, ascribe labels to entire populations in an effort to deem them inferior, and therefore disposable.

One can put forward that colonization, in this way, was a twisted form of creativity. It wasn’t simply a matter of power being exercised through violence. It was power wielded through imagination: creating and crafting a world that served one group of people while subjugating anyone who was not of a certain ilk. It was erasing, partially and completely, in some instances, whole cultures and identities.

But the story does not end there.

Creativity That Met Creativity

The focus is on what came next. The focus is on what was not erased, what refused to disappear despite a clear desire to make it so. Because if you allow yourself to think about it, what colonization sought to destroy, those who were colonized found ways to rebuild and reimagine. It is in these creative acts that we see survival. When colonization sought to erase languages, people found new and different ways to communicate. When they sought to wipe out culture, people found ways to protect and pass it on. What was meant to be erased was hidden in plain sight and kept alive, sometimes in ways that were barely perceptible. Yet it was always vital.

Creativity, in this case, was therefore not about art for art’s sake, but for survival. It was about surviving what was happening, preserving one’s identity at a time when everything was being erased, resisting the structures and building new worlds within the crevices of the old one. It was about healing and tending to the wounds of the trauma that came with being dehumanized, uprooted, devalued.

Holding On to What Was Supposed to Be Lost

Creativity also became an act of remembrance. Of keeping the past alive even when the present was intent on erasing it. In the face of forced forgetting, creativity shape-shifted. It adapted. It found new ways to exist. It made new homes. Music, for example, was encoded with maps, timings and strategies for enslaved Africans to escape, as was the case in the Underground Railroad (Songs of Slave Resistance, 2016). Similarly, storytelling, rituals and oral traditions became the means by which knowledge was passed on from generation to generation. The stories of Anansi the Spider – the mischief maker, wise sage and trickster – are still told today as they were told decades ago. Even the physical body became a site of memory. And even resistance. Women who were enslaved in the Americas braided rice and seeds into their hair to hold onto home and plant the seeds of their past in their new home (van Andel, et.al., 2024). These small, and often hidden acts were creative responses to the violence of the system, and a way to maintain the connection to home, heritage and self.

While the colonizers were reshaping the world to fit their ambitions and interests, the colonized were reimagining the world they lived in. They were creatively resisting the systems that sought to oppress them, building spaces of refuge, creating networks and community, and maintaining traditions that kept them connected to their cultural roots. In many ways, this was survival for the body, for the spirit, for memory and for culture.

Creating Under The Weight of History

Today, history seems to be repeating itself. Different yet similar patterns, shaped by the same forces of power and erasure, seem to be unfolding right before us. Entire communities are being displaced, families are being torn apart, identities are being questioned and stripped away, even forced into hiding. The same systems that sought to erase and redefine still persists today. The methods used have just gotten a little bit more sophisticated. Its in the policies, borders and institutions that now (or continue to) dictate who belongs, who is valued, and who is expendable.

History tells us that creativity showed up in the refusal to disappear, to surrender. The present is telling us that creativity needs to be a response and a refusal.

So what does it mean to create under the weight of history?

It means that we must continue to create.

We must continue to rebuild.

We must continue to reclaim.

We must hold on.

We must survive.

And in doing so, we do more than just carry history. We shape it.

This is the kind of creativity we’ll explore in Edgework: Care & Creativity at the Margins. The type of creativity that is used as a tool for survival, resistance, and collective care.

If you’re curious about exploring creativity as more than just making, more than just accolades and applause, I invite you to join me.

Enrollment is open, and I’d love to have you in a shared space of reflection, community, care and creation.

Come create dangerously with me.