One of the pleasures of this exercise is watching my students as they start to realize that, yes, wow, the director, Vittorio De Sica, really did take that much care. Every aspect of every frame has been carefully considered and lovingly used, and this is part of the reason the sequence moved them the first time they watched it. That is: De Sica was taking responsibility for every single thing in his film.

Of course he was. Bicycle Thieves is a great work of art and De Sica is an artist, and that’s what an artist does: takes responsibility.

In this world, my mother can weave back together her grandparents’ dreams that unraveled in Turkey. She won’t work in factories like they did. She will write and paint. She will sing the lyrics of her grandparents’ songs to music of her own invention. She will teach her daughters to sing too. She will show them that anything is possible. Perhaps dreams can be passed from mother to child through blood, or through whispering to womb, or through the sheer power of faith that can cross oceans and mountains and estrangements, because my mother’s dreams have always been my dreams: to create beauty from ink and thin air.

In this world, my father can carry his father’s dashed hopes of an academic life across continents. In his late forties, my grandfather got the university degree colonization had denied him. He studied literature. My father got a PhD in his twenties. He dreamed he would return home with his knowledge and use it to help build the Africa the generation before him had fought so long and hard for. As a child, I watched him do this. As an adult, I believe it might have killed him—the heartbreak from all of the suffering he could not end. Yet his dream, like my mother’s, was in me too.

b) ‘A Muslim is like a date palm tree whose leaves do not fall, always beneficial and never harmful.’

“This influences my organizing by reminding me that my core responsibility is to be a benefit to whatever I’m engaged in. I may not always know HOW that will happen but it has to be my aim. I want peoples’ lives to have been better (even in very tiny ways) from having participated with me in this work. This means to me that I bring beautiful words, actions, ideas, and behaviors into spaces. At the end of it all even if we don’t see the fruits of our labor, shouldn’t we be able to say we loved and enjoyed each other? That’s why I want to act and be like a palm tree, providing shade, covering my comrades (instead of throwing shade lol). I want to provide food (dates). I want to be what they can lean on. I want to be a resource, sustaining our work.”

—Aisha Shillingford

Amongst the Silent Stones

“The Surrealists delved into the subconscious, and swam on the surface of the oceanic possibilities of what was really the Shaman’s terrain. For Shamans and African image- makers know that we contain the universe inside us, that the sea is in the fish much as the fish is in the sea; that birds breathe their own flight; that forces in the human frame can interpenetrate matter, extend the bounds of time and space, enter the dreams of lions, and travel through the private histories of rivers and mountains.

*Fables are Made of This: For Ken Saro-Wiwa (1941-96)

“If you want to know what is happening in an age or in a nation, find out what is happening to the writers, the town-criers; for they are the seismographs that calibrate impending earthquakes in the spirit of the times. Are the writers sleeping? Then the age is in a dream. Are the writers celebrating? Then the first flowers of a modest golden age are sending their fragrances across to the shores of future possibilities. Are the writers strangely silent? Then the era is brooding with undeciphered disturbances. But when you hear that writers have been inexplicably murdered, silenced, that their houses have mysteriously burnt down, that grotesque lies are told against them, that they have fled their countries, that they dwell restlessly in exile, but above all when you hear that writers have been sentenced to death by unjust tribunals, then you can be sure that perils and the demons of war and the angels of fragmentation have already begun their dreaded descent into the blood and the suffering of the millions of people who inhabit that land.

Then you know that the air of that land is already rich with corruption and terror, that the air is unbreathable, that the lives are insufferable, that the soil has already begun to deliver its harvest of dead bodies and the bizarre plants of disaster, that liberty is dead in the fields, and that the government itself is under the grim sentence of death.

The writer is the barometer of the age. Elections can be rigged, their results undemocratically annulled, and the rightful leaders installed in the presidential quarters

of prison houses.