Rest is Resistance centers Black scholarship.
There is no rest movement in this country without the study of Black History.
It’s only fitting that my first entry is about a performance piece I created as a way to ground deeper into the Black scholarship at the center of the Rest is Resistance movement created by The Nap Ministry. During Bedtime Stories I read from classic Black liberation text while folks share a collective nap. The first workshop for the piece was 3 years ago at Free Street Theater on the South Side of Chicago. I read text from W.E.B. Dubois while a room of 20 people napped on yoga mats, sleeping bags and pillows. A portal for healing opened as the brilliance and power of Dubois softly filled the room like incense.
Since the pandemic, the piece has become digital with me reading from bell hooks and Audre Lorde on IG Live. I want our work to always center the Black thought that makes rest a social justice issue and a form of protest in a country created on the backs of Black people. White supremacy and capitalism drives the grind culture we see today.
Social media is a place that allows the intellectual labor of Black creators to be stolen, whitewashed and appropriated. When I started The Nap Ministry, I knew of no one examining rest from the lens of Black liberation theology, womanism, archival history on chattel slavery, cultural trauma, social justice and somatics. I was laughed at and trolled online when I first begin posting about rest as a justice issue in 2017. Proclaiming “rest is a form of resistance because it pushes back and disrupts capitalism and white supremacy,” triggered many. White folks, were of course, the majority of people in my inboxes and on threads demanding, “what does naps have to do with white supremacy? I thought this page was about naps.” The main ones erasing the Black scholarship and rest as reparations angle from the rest movement, as they put up posts and articles proclaiming rest as a fluffy “wellness” concept while ignoring the truth of rest being a radical disruption to the violent systems that have experimented and abused Black bodies and our labor for centuries. This rage, questioning, erasure and denial has been constant.
Rest as a justice issue is not new and has been led by Black people, the very people whose bodies were experimented on as capitalism was developed during slavery. To speak about rest as a justice issue without uplifting and examining the historic framework of slavery while centering it on the Black scholarship of thinkers like bell hooks, Audre Lorde, Toni Morrison, James Cone, Harriet Tubman, Sun Ra, etc., is simply erasure.
There is no rest movement that centers justice without Black people. I look forward to taking up space here on SubStack as I share essays documenting The Nap Ministry. As an archivist, I know how important it is that I continue to ensure rest as a justice issue remains focused on Black leadership.
My first book will be published October 2022 and titled: Rest Is Resistance: A Manifesto. It is dedicated to my ancestors who taught me how to rest.