Busy Being Black with Joshua Rivers

Farzana Khan is the tender titan leading the transformative work of Healing Justice London, which works to dignify lives made vulnerable and to cultivate public health provisions for collective liberation. She's a writer, cultural producer and award-winning arts educator, and her work centres community health, repair and self-transformation, rooted in disability justice, survivor work and trauma-i...

There is a divine vision for all of us and Mikael Owunna hopes his work can be a vessel for the transformation of our consciousness. Trained in the mechanics of bioengineering and empowered by the imaginative possibilities of photography, his artistic practice conjures queer Black people as embodied reflections of the black and brilliant cosmos. He does this work because he believes we, as queer B...

Many of us have an intimate and ongoing relationship to shame and shame forms part of a very public conversation about what it means to be queer in the world. And until my conversation today, which is with social worker and psychotherapist Rahim Thawer, I thought I had a pretty good grasp of what shame is. I was wrong. I wasn’t aware, for example, of how shame really operates, nor how it prevents...

Emily Aboud believes that art needs to be political. Whether in its critique of power or its provocation of joy and laughter, art must help move us towards freedom. Her cabaret-play, Splintered, gathers the first person experiences of 12 queer women in Trinidad and Tobago and weaves together these experiences to show how queer women living under threat of homophobic violence manage to cultivate an...

When we think of the sweeping constellation of music that is Americana, we could be forgiven for thinking of it as a genre that doesn’t really speak to our lived experiences as queer Black people. Emerging in the 1940s as music borne of the weathered realities of rural life in the United States, Americana is perhaps most closely — if not accurately — associated with the region of Appalachia and th...

In Theory and Play of the Duende, Spanish poet Federico García Lorca extolled the artistic necessity of duende – a poetic and artistic force that emerges from the darkness of our wounds. Lorca believed that art could only be great when duende was joined with wisdom and inspiration; the romance of angels and muses alone is not enough to create art that resonates with our fleshy, human experience. I...

This week, I’m in conversation with queer Black theologian and Anglican priest Father Jarel Robinson-Brown, whose theology and pastoral practice offer a re-embodied understanding of Christianity. Jarel is one of many theologians, poets and philosophers whose work has offered me an affirming and vitalising framework for understanding and practising my evolving spirituality. You’ll have heard me tal...

Father Jarel Robinson-Brown is a queer Black theologian and Anglican priest, whose 2021 book, Black, Gay, British, Christian, Queer: The Church and the Famine of Grace, takes the Church and its leadership to task for its exclusion of queer Black bodies, citing the historical and ongoing “ecclesial terrorism of the Christian community through its speech and its silence”. Far from justifying queer B...

This week, I'm in conversation with author and scholar Dagmawi Woubshet, whose 2015 book, The Calendar of Loss, has transformed how I engage with the work Black gay men created during the AIDS crisis of the 1980s and '90s. In this clip from our 2018 conversation, HIV activist and community organiser Marc Thompson shares insights about the Black gay experience in London in the 1980s. About Marc Tho...

I cherish my copy of Joseph Beam and Essex Hemphill’s 1991 anthology, Brother to Brother: New Writings by Black Gay Men. It is a soaring, sensual and at times heartbreaking collection of the writings, plays, poetry and speeches of some of the Black gay men we lost during the AIDS crisis of the 1980s and 1990s. I cherish it because it has affirmed my unequivocal spiritual lineage to the Black gay m...

In his essay, "Nothing Personal", James Baldwin writes: “One discovers the light in darkness, that is what darkness is for; but everything in our lives depends on how we bear the light. It is necessary, while in darkness, to know that there is a light somewhere, to know that in oneself, waiting to be found, there is a light. What the light reveals is danger, and what it demands is faith.” What lig...

I've been drawn to expressions of art and life that speak to a wisdom shared with me by mentor: "Your ministry is in your DNA". The work we choose do in the world, the people we choose to be against the odds, is how each of us does the ministering necessary to ensure we and our communities can thrive. We live as an expression of our truth. And the ministry we're engaged in is one that requires def...

Can we look at the stars queerly? And if so, how might queer star-gazing help orient us towards earthly liberation? To help me answer these questions is Dr Chanda Prescod-Weinstein – a theoretical cosmologist and particle physicist. Her book, The Disordered Cosmos, presents a Black queer feminist challenge to the dominant understanding of physics and calls for a more robust and intersectional appr...

My conversation this week is with artist, producer and educator malakaï sergeant. During the recording of our conversation, malakaï flagged the carceral geographies many of us have become so accustomed to – limiting and murderous as they can be. In the moment, I grabbed one of my favourite books of poetry, The Actual by Inua Ellams – an incisive, fiery and tender defence of Black liveliness. My fa...

In 2020, as we enclosed ourselves to protect ourselves and others from the ravages of Covid-19, I noticed for the first time in a long time the resonant chorus of birdsong. Without the sound and smog of vehicles, the natural world around us began to sing more loudly. As I discovered through a conversation between Krista Tippett and sound ecologist Gordon Hempton on the radio programme On Being, th...

Busy Being Black is the award-winning podcast exploring how we live in the fullness of our queer Black lives. Each week, I have conversations with academics, artists, activists, thinkers and change-makers who help me and listeners understand ourselves as complex and complicated, messy, beautiful and vibrant people making the grandest and noblest attempts to thrive. Whether we’re searching for our...

I’ve been utterly enchanted by Walter Brueggemann’s 1978 book, The Prophetic Imagination. In it, this preeminent theologian helps us understand the role of the prophet: a truth-teller, whose ministry utilises grief to criticise the dominant order. In doing so, prophets energise those suffering under brutalisation and awaken us all to possibilities of life beyond what we know. Part of what the domi...

One of my favourite quotes is from the late Toni Morrison: “Sometimes you don’t survive whole, you just survive in part. But the grandeur of life is that attempt. It’s not about that solution. It is about being as fearless as one can, behaving as beautifully as one can, under completely impossible circumstances. It’s that that makes it elegant.” For those of us inclined to share ourselves through...

My conversation this week is with Ahmed Best, a story teller, artist, educator and futurist who helps facilitate the game Afrorithms from the Future. In this bonus episode, Ahmed and Afrorithms from the Future co-creator Dr Lonny Brooks take Long Time Academy host Ella Saltmarshe through the game. Afrorithims from the Future is a collaborative, design thinking, storytelling game that helps activat...

I’m still revelling in an acute awe, inaugurated by the images captured by the Just Wonderful Space Telescope in July. As a big and beautiful conversation about our significance continues, a persistent narrative about how small we are has emerged and I suspect that the language deployed to make us insignificant as we gaze at the stars, has something to do with the dominant culture’s denuding of ou...

This is episode 100 of Busy Being Black. To honour this milestone, my friend DYLEMA takes my seat to interview me. Busy Being Black emerged four years ago at a time of great personal distress – and transformation. I am unendingly grateful that you all keep showing up, tuning in and talking back. About DYLEMA DYLEMA is an acronym: Do You and Let Every Man Adapt. She is an artist, musician and spoke...

I’m in conversation with Rico Norwood, who opens our conversation with a beautiful and important introduction to Isaac Julien’s seminal film Looking for Langston. As well as doing more justice to Looking for Langston’s importance than I could, we open with this introduction because Rico flags an important word “quare”, which – as some of you already know – I have tattooed right across my throat. “...

My admiration of Travis Alabanza runs deep. They were one of the first people to say yes to me and Busy Being Black at a time of tremendous uncertainty for me, and our 2018 conversation remains a firm favourite with listeners. The wisdom and insights Travis shared on art, gender, race and self-awareness are as relevant and salient today as then. I find them refreshing, not least for the ways they...

2015 and 2016 were big years for me: in April 2015, I was shocked into my political awakening by the Baltimore riots, which erupted after the funeral of Freddie Gray. The rage and grief expressed through the riots inspired me to action: how might I be part of a solution? And a year later, in 2016, I stumbled on No Tea, No Shade, an anthology of nineteen essays from scholars, activists, and communi...

I’ve long admired the work of Da’Shaun L. Harrison. Like many of those I’ve come to encounter and adore over the past few years, Da’Shaun’s work came across my timeline on social media and their incisive and invigorating intellectual offerings have had me hooked since. Da’Shaun is a Black, fat, queer and trans theorist and abolitionist, and in their debut book, Belly of the Beast: The Politics of...