Room

by THE EDITORS
in Fall 2024

Rooms are enclosed spaces that are simultaneously sites of conversation, of intimacy, of being together with ourselves and others. Most of our lives are spent enshrouded within these walls. We are constantly surrounded by structures that were created to enable privacy. In some ways, life in the west is a life of seclusion. For the writer, more so. 

The Bakongo imagined a house as one without walls,  a space where the most important conversations concerning the community were to happen. The mbongi, that house, our house, was/is one big room. A room as convivial. A room as a space of deliberation. A room as no one’s own, but all’s. 

A Gathering Together seeks to embrace mbongi and invites you to consider the meanings of seclusion and the social as sites for art-making. What rooms do we as writers and artists inhabit? Are these the spaces that allow the work to be crafted, that allow us to find home in the ancestral sense? Can we imagine forms of collective being that create the safety and security of privacy and the beauty of collective, improvisatory creation with each other?

The short story by Jedah Mayberry included in this issue takes place in a room that was a shared space in the wake of the loss of one person who made that space shared. The poems included here converge around the idea that the self and the collective are intimately related and that all of us need room to grow into the best versions of ourselves. We all need rooms of our own that are made by others for us. Think of the shared space of Velma and the healers in Toni Cade Bambara’s The Salt-Eaters, a novel that happens in one room. We all need living in the living room that June Jordan desired for us.

Our featured artist is photographer Alfonso Campbell, III whose series of photos were shot mostly in a small room in the Adams Morgan neighborhood of DC. They show the potential of the room to capture, but not fully contain a buoyant Blackness, a social sensibility and demand for vibrancy, that comes to us directly from those who declared that we as African peoples would have room to be.