Oblation
by THE EDITORS
in Fall 2022
Karim Brown, from On Being a Child, 2022
An oblation is a ritual offering to God. Words are our offerings. A Gathering Together is an offering.
To participate in this journal—where writing reanimates our lives, touches our ancestors—is to participate in such a ritual. Literate and literary traditions made rituals out of words because they connected their power to the godly act of creation. We can create our reality with new words, or as Ayi Kwei Armah once stated, with “the best of words.” He writes: “Not only the best of words, but also the best of sounds, phrases, pauses, sentences, images, figures—the best, in sum of every tool available to verbal art.”[1]
The best of words are Divine, an oblation. This not a question only of style, it is a question of what we require to shape our worlds. It is in that spirit that we must always remind ourselves that to create is a serious thing. To imagine is a serious thing. To place these “best of words” on a page is a serious thing—to read them, a ritual.
Today, much like in our recent pasts, we require rituals to remember what we lost. We are experiencing loss on a mass scale—the loss of life, the loss of our way, the loss of things we never knew we could have. In this moment, we ask: How does a lost thing find itself?
Make oblation.
So, we invite you to ponder on loss as a way to think about what it is we can regenerate. To echo the sentiment of our Spring 2022 editors' note, trouble truly does not last always. Chaos is not everything. We make oblation in these times of trouble. We make oblation to staunch the loss. We make oblation so we can see again what it must have looked like for us to live our lives as they ought to be lived.
References
[1] Ayi Kwei Armah, The Eloquence of the Scribes: A Memoir and the Sources and Resources of African Literature (Popenguine, Senegal: Per Ankh Books), 243.