There is Nothing New Under the Sun.
Although the year is still in its infancy, in so many ways it feels old. Images from Tehran echo 1979. Events in Caracas mirror 1989. And scenes from Minneapolis evoke 1967.
Throughout time, artists have been designated prophets for their ability to see what is to come. Perhaps it’s not divine revelation but something more scientific, an ability to contend deeply with current reality and to drive it to its logical conclusion.
Ancient biblical wisdom tells us that there is nothing new under the sun. Yesterday’s cotton plantations are today’s warehouses, and yesterday’s propaganda printing presses are today’s algorithms. The essence of our socio-political challenges stubbornly endure across time, albeit through varied modalities and shifting contexts.
However, this rhyming nature of history does offer us some gifts, one of which is captured so incisively by James Baldwin who said “you read something which you thought only happened to you, and you discover that it happened 100 years ago to Dostoyevsky. This is a very great liberation for the suffering, struggling person, who always thinks that he is alone. This is why art is important.”
The Creativity Pioneers Fund (CPF) ecosystem is, for many within its community, the only peer-to-peer network that they belong to. And their encounters with other Creativity Pioneers from other parts of the world abates their loneliness. It is in this 200-member strong community that many have discovered that what has happened to them is not isolated but rather connected to histories, entangled in geographies and implicated in cultures other than their own.
It is under the rays of this global community that a Pioneer from Nepal dealing with the attendant challenges of an unfolding revolution encounters a Pioneer from Beirut who knows all too well how scorching this time can be. At our gatherings, shared experiences are threaded and the universality of our experiences are brought to bear, narrowing the distance between us.
Because nothing is new under the sun, we are able to be each other’s references and waypoints, each one of us carrying a piece of a much larger map. And for the CPF, bringing together disparate pieces of the map is a chance to discover new routes, new places and the warmth of other suns.
But There Are Other Suns.
Aside from its modest gifts, the cyclical nature of history of course has its curses too. Upon casting a long lens on history it would be reasonable to believe that we are stuck in an unbreakable loop. The aphorism that ‘the more things change, the more they stay the same’ undermines our agency and stands at painful odds with the changemaking mission we have articulated for ourselves.
It can seem that we are doomed to the proverbial plantation, caught in an unbreakable, ancestral and inescapable web of oppression.
The late Octavia Butler, widely considered the mother of Afrofuturism, captured the tension between this stuckness and the desire to break free in an epigram to her unpublished book “The Parable of the Trickster” giving richer meaning to that biblical wisdom- that although there is nothing new under the sun, Butler insists that there are new suns.
Before Butler there was poet and writer, Richard Wright, born on a plantation in America’s Jim Crow South, which he sought to escape. In his memoir, Black Boy, he shares – ‘I was leaving the South to fling myself into the unknown. I was taking a part of the South to transplant in alien soil, to see if it could grow differently, if it could drink of new and cool rains, bend in strange winds, respond to the warmth of other suns and, perhaps, to bloom.’
The CPF is not just a community of commiseration over unchanging circumstances but a platform from which we can fling ourselves into the unknown in pursuit of other suns. We are tricksters and fugitives making use of creative thinking and skills to scramble this loop. To be fugitive in search of other suns is, according to Prof Ruth Wilson Gilmore, not just running away from something, but the ongoing process of building alternative, liberatory spaces and ‘rehearsing’ new ways of living.
Other suns is about living the future today.
Maria Rilke says that the future enters us before it happens. In that case then, our work is to ensure that our inner horizons, where other suns first emerge, are vast. And creativity is how we expand those inner and outer horizons, narrowing the threshold between the world as it is now and the one that is on its way.
This is the time of other suns, the time of disorientation as we embark upon unprecedented voyages and the time of insisting on the strength of tendernessagainst the tough headwinds of change.
We look forward, to not only pursuing other suns together, but perhaps even blooming in their warmth.
