The Breath in the Dark: Narrative as Survival

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Kismet Rapid Response Issue: F*ck ICE (2026)

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“The Breath in the Dark: Narrative as Survival” appeared as the introduction to the Kismet Magazine’s Rapid Response Issue: F*ck ICE (2026), a print-only publication with proceeds going to multiple local Indiana legal defense funds.

We are currently navigating a climate of manufactured shadows. When a government’s enforcement wing begins to operate with the quiet, terrifying efficiency of a secret police, we are no longer dealing with the letter of the law but with an act of erasure. What we are seeing with the evolution of ICE into a roving, unchecked force is the normalization of the snatch-and-grab, a tactic designed to make the target disappear and the witness feel powerless. In Minneapolis, where the streets should hold the rhythm of community, and in my own hometown of Memphis, the air is thick with a predatory reckless machinery. They drive through school zones like hunters in high-speed pursuit of the vulnerable; they refuse the badge and the name; they turn the mundane corners of our lives into sites of state-sanctioned kidnapping. These are not merely detainment centers; they are for-profit concentration camps where women and children are unmade in a frightening silence. There is no communication, no reach, only the stories that leak out like blood—of families severed, and of the few who are released into the deadly cold of the middle of the night, far from home, a release that is its own kind of death sentence.

In these moments, story is not an ornament; it is the only map we have that the state cannot burn. Speculative fiction has always been the literature of the look here disguised as the what if. It is a genre built to interrogate the present, to excavate the buried truths of our ancestors, and to reimagine a world where the van never arrives. For those whose humanity has been historically contested, the act of imagining a future is a radical act of reclamation. We are the conjurers who look at the iron bars of the present and see the possibility of light. Before we had the rights of citizens, we had the innovations of the imagination, using narrative to pierce the fog of state-sanctioned gaslighting. This is the purpose of art in a time of crisis: to provide the spiritual and intellectual mutual aid that sustains us when the physical world feels like it is closing in.

In my community, this tradition of using the Word as a revelatory light is a necessity born from a five-century lineage of kidnapping and psychological warfare. The normalization of violence against the Black and Indigenous body, spirit, and mind is the very bedrock of this soil. It is a haunting that began in 1526, at the settlement of San Miguel de Gualdape—in the coastal lands of what we now call Georgia and South Carolina—when the first recorded Africans were human-trafficked to these shores. They did not submit; they immediately resisted, revolting and seeking refuge among the Indigenous nations who were already enduring the systematic theft of their ancestral lands. From that moment, the American project became obsessed with the control of movement and the regulation of the soul. Whether we speak of the Tignon Laws in New Orleans, enacted to suppress the power and the luminous beauty of Black and Creole women who wore their hair as a crown of defiance, or the racial apartheid that German thinkers studied before visiting their own horrors upon Namibia and the world, the goal has always been to strip the human of their right to exist with dignity.

But we must remember that we have done hard things before. We have survived the middle passage, the plantation, and the laws of incarceration that sought to turn our very existence into a crime. The first Black speculative writings in this country were often alternate histories and stories of liberation—visions that boldly dismantled the state’s narrative of subjugation long before the physical shackles were broken. We knew instinctively that if we did not define ourselves for ourselves, we would be crunched into other people’s fantasies for us and eaten alive. Throughout our history in America, in nearly every era, we have created stories, narratives, songs, and other art to combat vitriolic hatred with our own visions of the future, fighting fascism with visionary truth. We boldly told our stories through Ring shouts, field hollers, spirituals, and gospel. Nearly every genre of American music was born from this refusal to be silenced, using rhythm and melody to combat vitriolic hatred with a vision of a future that belonged to us.

During the century-long struggle of the Gullah Wars, our ancestors created a landscape of resistance that was as much cultural as it was martial. They forged songs that were secret maps and lore that acted as armor. We see this in the Ibo lore of the Flying Africans – a profound speculative narrative that allowed a kidnapped people to reclaim their agency, imagining a flight back across the ocean to a home the state tried to make them forget. These stories were the technologies of survival that allowed a maroon culture to thrive in the swamps and Sea Islands. People instinctively look to my community today for models of resistance, for how to be resourceful and get back up after being struck down, because we have never been silent. We have always chosen to fight for what is already ours, our humanity and our dignity on this earth.

The poison of this violence has reached an acceleration point today, escaping the boundaries of the communities where it was first perfected and seeping into the wider body politic. The escalation we see, the reckless disregard for life in our neighborhoods, is a reminder that we cannot seek safety by turning away from the injustice visited upon others. To remain silent in the face of the snatch-and-grab is to invite the monster to your own door, for the nature of state-sanctioned cruelty is that it is never satisfied. If no one is willing to breathe a word or lift a hand, the monster will eventually eat us all. We must name the injustice honestly and speak out in ways that resonate, even if it is in a piece of art, a story, a song, or a dance.

Creating art in such a time is an act of pragmatic hope. It is a tool for survival as real as a bail fund or a community kitchen. When we tell a story that insists on the sacredness of the person, we are providing the action tools for resistance. We speak out because art is the collective immune system against the decay of our humanity. We are the keepers of the light when the power goes out, the ones who hold the names in our hearts when the state tries to delete them from the earth. As long as we hold the light, we will always be that living, resilient breath in the dark.