Amena Brown:
Hey, everybody. Welcome back to this week's episode of HER With Amena Brown. I've just had a lot of like strange schedule things going on, y'all, so I haven't been able to bring guests back into the living room. But it is that time. It is that time today. And I'm very excited about the guests who will be here with us in our living room. Creator and writer of Black Liturgies, a project that integrates spiritual practice with Black emotion, Black literature, and the Black body. New York Times bestselling author of This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories That Make Us. Welcome to the HER living room, Cole Arthur Riley.
Cole Arthur Riley:
Thanks for having me.
Amena Brown:
I know the people are clapping too, Cole. I mean, some of them are driving so they can't. But the other people that aren't driving, they just clap too. I know they did.
Cole Arthur Riley:
Love that.
Amena Brown:
Cole, thank you so much for joining me. Y'all, I am so excited. Cole and I are just like meeting, meeting, like getting a chance to talk in real time for the first time. But I was very honored to be one of the folks who had the opportunity to get an early read on This Here Flesh and had the honor of being one of the folks to get to write some words of endorsement about this book. So New York Times the bestselling author. Cole, how does it feel?
Cole Arthur Riley:
It still feels like a dream, honestly. It's when people like you say it that I'm like, "Oh, that happened. That was real." But yeah, it feels good and scary and. But I'm happy.
Amena Brown:
Oh my gosh. I'm so excited for you and excited for the readers as well. I mean, I know many of us, many of you listening have probably already been enjoying Cole's writing in your essays and articles. And for those of us who are followers of Black Liturgies, we've been enjoying some pieces of the things that you write, but to get a chance to sort of see in this book, there is this sort of fullness that when you have encountered a writer in other short forms of writing, and then you get a chance to read their book. You're sort of getting more of the story of them, the story of their process in more of a fullness, even though I know about book writing, there are many things we have to leave out of that, out of that process, but how exciting.
Amena Brown:
So I have to start with something that's very important, which is snacks. And I'm starting with snacks, Cole, as the question that I want to ask you about, because this is leading into Philly food, and I do need to be honest about that. But I just want to start in general with snacks because when I think about this podcast, I always think about what I do with my girlfriends. And we typically get together in one another's living rooms, and we're always sort of piecing together some type of snacks.
Amena Brown:
If we're having a night that we're like, "I don't want to go out. I don't want to see other people. I don't want to do that restaurant. I just want to come to your house and tell you what's up. I want to cuss, I want to watch TV, whatever it is." And we typically sort of bring our little piece meal snack situations together. So when you get together with your girlfriends, what is your favorite snack to bring?
Cole Arthur Riley:
Okay. In the past two years, this is what I'm bringing, flaming hot Doritos. Not the Cheetos, the Doritos. And if you can find the super flaming hot Doritos, that just hurt on the way down, that's what I'm bringing. So good. Twizzlers usually. And then I know this isn't really like a... People don't consider this like snack food so much, but to me, Craisins taste like candy and I will stick beside them. I love Craisins as a sweet tart addition.
Amena Brown:
I thank you for bringing Craisins into the chat because they are not spoken of enough, in my opinion. I have done my own sort of impromptu trail mix situation in a Craisin's bag just through some peanuts up in there through a almond or two. A sunflower seed shook that up and I'm there already. I don't even have to try to find a trail mix that has the mix of things I like. Craisins are where it's at people. Boy, on a salad, sprinkle some Craisins people. It does the work
Cole Arthur Riley:
It makes everything go down easier, Craisins.
Amena Brown:
I mean, that sweet tart situation, I want to thank you for bringing that to the table. This is my segue. We know from reading This Here Flesh that you have sort of a rootedness there in Pennsylvania and mainly in Pittsburgh. Right? But you do have some roots in Philly as well, right?
Cole Arthur Riley:
Yeah. I lived in Philly for a number of years.
Amena Brown:
I need to talk to you about Philly food for a moment here, because I went to Philly and I am a person who enjoys a city for its food. I am into that and I went to Philly, and I really was there. Maybe this is touristy of me, but I really am there just trying to get this authentic cheese steak. I did that. It was great. But I really need to tell you what really changed my life about Philly is the hoagie. I have a lot of emotional feelings about the hoagies that I have enjoyed there. And there's some kind of a... First of all, I think the bread is not available where I live in Atlanta.
Amena Brown:
People say they're making hoagie's down here. I'm not sure they are because I don't think the bread is right. And then there's some sort of an herb oil. There's something going on with some oil and some vinegar that when I try to buy those ingredients at the store and make a sandwich at my house, it's not doing what the hoagie is doing in Philly.
Amena Brown:
So I would like to hear your thoughts about hoagies. And then I would like to hear, if you could recommend the food people should eat in Philly, what would you say? Please discuss.
Cole Arthur Riley:
Okay. Love a hoagie. I think Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania, we love a hoagie. You order pizza, but you can't order pizza without ordering a hoagie where I'm from. And in Philly, I think it's all in the bread. We're not at New York City level with our breads, but we're trying. I can't remember the place we used to go. I want to say Geno's, but that doesn't sound right. Maybe I'll send it to you after and you can include a hoagie shop in the show notes. I'm a big fan of dim sum.
Amena Brown:
Speak a word about dim sum today.
Cole Arthur Riley:
Love dim sum. I love the community. I mean COVID times have kind of changed things a little bit, but it's this communal feeling you can have a little bit of everything for people who have buyer's remorse or afraid. It's low risk because there's always something else that's being rotated. So love dim sum. There's a place called Dim Sum Garden on Race Street in Philly. Best soup dumplings I've ever had anywhere, including New York City. Don't come for me. Don't come for my neck.
Amena Brown:
Please don't. Please don't.
Cole Arthur Riley:
But best. I went to New York City. I was like, "Oh, I can't wait for these soup dumplings." They were good. But I was fantasizing about Dim Sum Garden on Race Street in Philly. You have to go. The line sometimes is out of control, but bring cash. They don't accept cards. So that's place for dumplings, dim sum.
Cole Arthur Riley:
There's a Pakistani restaurant in West Philly called Wah-Gi-Wah. I've never in my life had Pakistani food, never in my life before moving to Philly. This is the only Pakistani food I've ever had. So if it's not, I mean, the people there are from Pakistan. I assume it's authentic, but it is so good. It's like a different kind of naan. Like the naan they serve, it's slightly different than like an Indian naan, and definitely different than like a roti. But it's so good. They give you like a whole like round. It's like a pizza round of their naan, which is good. I get the chicken tikka masala.
Amena Brown:
Wow.
Cole Arthur Riley:
Those are the two big places that I have during the pandemic. Because I live in upstate New York now in our food scene and Ithaca is just not. It's just not where it needs to be. During the pandemic we can't go anywhere. Our shops are shut down and our restaurants are shut down anyways for dining indoors, takeout. If the food is already subpar, takeout, it's going to be even worse.
Amena Brown:
Struggle.
Cole Arthur Riley:
So we drove three and a half hours to Philly twice in the past two years just to get Dim Sum Garden and Wah-Gi-Wah take out, drive it back home, heat it up and eat it. No lie. That's how good this food is.
Amena Brown:
Yo, I can't knock the hustle. I respect that choice because during the pandemic I have thought several times about the food in Philly and now you've given me additional food to think about. I have a friend in my phone. I text her sometimes just to be like, "Boy, that herb oil situation on those hoagies." And she'll be like, "What? Why is that what I'm getting here? Why are we doing this?" And I'm like, "It's important. I don't know what you want from me. I'm just letting you know. Is there a way you could get a bottle of that and send it to me down here, because it's not computing here."
Amena Brown:
So I thank you for that because I was like, I feel like Cole is going to know the vibes and you did know the vibes. Thank you, Cole for that. I too, Philly, want to take a tour there. I too. It would be a longer drive for me, Cole. But when you said that, I was kind of like-
Cole Arthur Riley:
Hey.
Amena Brown:
... a little bit of consideration. A little bit of consideration. Cole, what is your favorite Black movie?
Cole Arthur Riley:
Oh, Moonlight. It's not even just my favorite Black movie, it's just my favorite movie, Moonlight. I don't know what critique you can give that film, but it's beautiful art. Nuance. I mean talk about nuance. Black characters instead of caricatures. There are some nuance characters in that film that will stay with me until I die. You haven't seen Moonlight. Today is the day. Tonight is the night. Watch it.
Amena Brown:
Y'all have to see it. I remember I watched this before the pandemic, but I watched it at home. I didn't watch it in the theater. And there are some movies that I'm like, "Man, that's a movie you should see in the theater." I'm certain I would've enjoyed Moonlight in the theater, but there was something about being at home, taking in that film, taking in the cinematography. I loved how gorgeous the skin of the characters. There was so many scenes where the light on the skin was just so beautiful. And so many layers to that story.
Amena Brown:
There was some sort of sense of like comfort or the way I took that in at home. But I don't know if I would've taken it in exactly that way the same if I had watched it in a theater. So shout out to that. I recommend, y'all. Tonight is your night. Get involved with Moonlight. It is everything
Cole Arthur Riley:
Beautiful.
Amena Brown:
What is your favorite, it could be a Black girl hairstyle as far as a hairstyle you loved when you were a little girl or it could be currently your favorite Black woman hairstyle that you love to wear.
Cole Arthur Riley:
It's got to be Senegalese twist for me. I mean, I know it might only be a few weeks that they actually stay in, but I just feel regal. I feel so regal when I have twists or braids. I feel more mature. I feel like, I don't know. This seems weird to say, but twists, braids have a way of making me take myself more seriously. I don't know if it's because the women I admired growing up would have their hair and braided styles, but I like the way the twists look, but they just don't last. So I need them to last all the time, but that's my favorite hairstyle when I can get it done. Times being what they are, it's hard to get my hair done the way I want.
Amena Brown:
Right. No, that's a fair point. I feel like the pandemic has sort of... I think it's given me more dreams of styles I wish I could try that I might have access to at the moment. And then there are a few things I've learned how to do better myself because that was the option. What to do at my house. So I learned how to flat twist a lot better. Those flat twists were a struggle before the pandemic, but here we are. I just had time to practice. So I did.
Amena Brown:
Talk to me about your favorite song to get the party started. If you were at a party, what's the song that the DJ plays that you're like, "And now the party has started."
Cole Arthur Riley:
Okay. This is an interesting question for me because I'm not a party person. I mean, someone called me boring. But let me really try to take it back to my college years. Was there something in me? Probably not. I'll tell you like when I'm in the car, what's like some pump up music? So stretch because I only listen to like sad. I'm like only make sad music.
Amena Brown:
I mean, it could be a different type of party Cole. Maybe it's not the type of party that people are raising the roof or whatever. Maybe your party is more of a contemplative nature.
Cole Arthur Riley:
That's true.
Amena Brown:
That's fine.
Cole Arthur Riley:
You know what, that's true. That's my party. We're sitting. It's a candle lit living room. We're putting on Heaux Tales 99% of the time. That's what we're putting on.
Amena Brown:
That's a good choice. Shout out to Jazmine Sullivan. I want to give a big shout out to that. Also, I want to give a shout out to this Grammy that Jazmine Sullivan just won for Heaux Tales. And the way she got-
Cole Arthur Riley:
Fire away.
Amena Brown:
Okay. First of all, finally, thank you, Cole, because, yes. And the way she held this space for Black women when she got up there to make her acceptance speech, I just had to touch my hand to my heart for a few minutes. I was like, "Come on." I was having that moment of like, "Oh Jazmine, I'm looking at you. I'm so happy to see you winning. I'm just happy for you. Congrats to you." And then that she sort of turned that moment back to us and said like, "Black women, this is for you." I was like-
Cole Arthur Riley:
This is ours.
Amena Brown:
... it's also congratulations to me. I love to see that.
Cole Arthur Riley:
Yep, beautiful.
Amena Brown:
Ooh, that's a great one. I do think number one, I do think that gets the party started. And I love envisioning various eccentric types of partying, Cole. It doesn't all have to look the same. And I like that you brought this into the living room. You can have a party to contemplate some things to sit in the room with the people, hold space with them. I get it. I feel it.
Cole Arthur Riley:
Yes, thank you for liberating me into that. That's the kind of party vibe I'm after.
Amena Brown:
I feel it. Okay, now I'm going to ask you this. You're welcome to pass, but if you're willing to share, do you have a favorite cuss word?
Cole Arthur Riley:
I don't have a favorite. The one I probably say the most is probably damn. No, it's probably shit. I probably say shit the most. You can draw it out, "Sheeit."
Amena Brown:
All right, Cole. Yes.
Cole Arthur Riley:
It lends itself to poetry.
Amena Brown:
It is its own answer. It's like somehow someone could be asking a question and she could be the answer. The people who know, know. When they hear that answer they're like, "And I thank you. You have told me everything I need to know." You could be asking that person about a store they went to, about if they know so and so, about if they went to the event that was last week. And if they say, "Sheeit," which typically to me is followed with or proceeded by some sort of mouth noise. It's like... Or sheeit. It's a little mix like that, Cole. What gravity that word has. I like it. That's a good one. That's a good choice. Thank you.
Amena Brown:
I want to talk a little bit about Toni Morrison and the work of Toni Morrison comes up in Black Liturgies. We are also seeing this here in the book. I want to talk about her work and how her work is a spiritual influence with you. Talk to me more about that.
Cole Arthur Riley:
Sure, Toni Morrison. So I first encountered her work in college. I'm trying to figure out a book I'd read by a Black author before college. I'm currently trying to revisit some memories and try to figure out, did I even read Black authors before college? But I encountered her work for the first time in college. I of course knew who she was, but I'd never actually read anything.
Cole Arthur Riley:
And that was around the time that I was first really experiencing Christian spaces for the first time or overtly Christian spaces, and this was the first time I was going to church regularly on my own. It was a very white evangelical space I should say. And to me, everything about college was just new. People in my family didn't go to college and it was just very different from the place I was coming from.
Cole Arthur Riley:
So I kind of just looped everything that happened to me into this one big box of like, "This is the unknown. This is new." So it was very difficult for me to kind of distinguish what I was learning in the classroom from the first time to separate that from what I was experiencing and learning in church for the first time.
Cole Arthur Riley:
I just couldn't compartmentalize those things, like the compartment was college. So I found myself bringing Black. I studied English literature in the end. I found myself bringing Black authors into the pew with me. I mean, thank God I had them to help me interrogate some of the things I was hearing or the kind of binaries that were being presented. I just didn't find those spiritual binaries in Black literature. And I certainly didn't find them in Morrison's work.
Cole Arthur Riley:
To explain that, I think Black literature especially Morrison, there's something about how she was able to articulate the spiritual that wasn't about certainty, and it wasn't about clarity. It was about conveying. Conveying the human experience and including the spiritual in that human experience as opposed to this is what this means and X equals this.
Cole Arthur Riley:
I just love that and gravitated toward that kind of mystery. So Beloved. It's the most terrifying Morrison book, I would say. But it's closest to me and closest to my spiritual formation in Beloved. There's this kind of famous clearing. Toni Morrison gives us the space of the clearing, where if you haven't read it, the matriarch, Baby Suggs, she gathers her people. She sits into the middle of the clearing on this rock and the woman, and the men, and the children, and the people are kind of waiting on the perimeter.
Cole Arthur Riley:
And she says, "Children, let the children come." And she says, "Let your mothers hear you laugh and the kids break out laughing." And then she says, "Men, come. Let your wives and children see you dance." And then the men start dancing. Then she calls the woman to the center and says cry for the living and the dead. Just cry and the woman let loose. She describes the scene where the women start laughing in the end. And the men sit down and start crying, and the children start dancing. And they all get tangled up in each other and then exhausted. They just kind of lay there together. And then she gives her sermon.
Cole Arthur Riley:
Morrison very specifically says she didn't tell them to go and send no more, which is like the typical, maybe white evangelical message, "Go and send it. That's the gospel." She says that she didn't tell them that to call them to awaken to grace. And then she delivers the sermon. That's all about the body. "In this here place, we flesh; flesh that weeps, laughs; flesh that dances on bare feet and grass." Love it.
Cole Arthur Riley:
And it's this message of loving the body, loving the flesh. Anyways, all that to say, that moment of the clearing, it's intergenerational. It's storied. It's emotional. It's not a practice of the mind. It's emotional. It's embodied. And whenever I think about what I want my spirituality to be, that's where I go. That's the kind of spirituality I want to possess.
Amena Brown:
So was Beloved your gateway into Toni Morrison's work? Was that the first book of hers that you remember encountering?
Cole Arthur Riley:
Yes, it was. That was the first. Yeah, she didn't scare me away. But I mean that was the first. And it's hard. It's hard to wait. There's a real disorientation in the beginning of a lot of her work and a lot of in a similar way to Octavia Butler. There's this beginning that is just so disorienting that you're trying to figure out what's up, what's down? Who's this? Who's that? You have the matriarch being called Baby, Baby Suggs. There's so much... And you could talk for ages about that, the beauty in that, but there's something about the beginning of Beloved, that's just the slow connections.
Cole Arthur Riley:
She's not quick to resolve and I think people like things that resolve. People want things to resolve, and Morrison is really disinterested in that, which challenged me.
Amena Brown:
Still. I mean, I love the idea that you were carrying some of this work into a church setting. I just love that because so many of Toni Morrison's books feel so much like a spiritual text. I think that's such a powerful thing to think about. I'm like, "Let me see what Toni Morrison books I have downstairs. Next time I go up in the church, let me grab one of those." And they'll be like, somebody be sitting next to me like, "What is this? This is not... I'm gonna turn to a page and [inaudible 00:24:05]."
Cole Arthur Riley:
We're not the same.
Amena Brown:
It's not the same. And I'm gonna be like, "You mind your business and let me do what I'm doing over here." I think my initial gateway into Toni's work was Tar Baby. My mom had that book for some reason in her library. And I remember taking it out and opening up the first couple of pages. I was young enough to know that I was reading something amazing and I did not understand a word. Which I was like, "This is amazing. What is she talking about?" I don't know. And then I think I tried Beloved at 12 and it was all manner of confusions. It was all manner of, "Who's alive and who died? And who died, but is still alive?"
Cole Arthur Riley:
Is that a real ghost?
Amena Brown:
I mean, now, Cole, which is something that I really loved about This Here Flesh. I loved this about your book. It had this sense of feeling so grounded, so rooted. Rooted in people, in place. I loved that. And I loved that there was this way, you left a lot of space out there for us as the reader. You left a lot of space for us to not come into the text of your book and feel like you were there to give us answers.
Amena Brown:
You were there to be this... In some ways you sometimes felt like you were author, but also observing. And that you were sort of encouraging us as the reader. We step back and sort of, we look, we see, we think about what we perceive, right? And then there were times you're sort of inviting us into stories that happened to you or happened to members of your family.
Amena Brown:
And then there were times in that. You were sort of there at the center of the story, because it is happening to you or at the stories being told to you know. I loved that sort of breathing room that you left in there. And I think that is something as a writer, I always admired about authors like Toni Morrison that it was not to write a story to say, "And here we derive an answer." That was never the point that it was to say, "And here we are being. We're present in a space. We'll laugh, we'll cry. We will wonder the page may end and we still don't know what happened to so-and-so." And maybe you need to think about that reader. I really, really loved that. Do you have a favorite of Toni Morrison's work that you love or is Beloved that favorite for you?
Cole Arthur Riley:
Beloved is definitely that favorite. I mean, it's traumatizing. Trauma on those pages. But there's so much beauty, and I just think it's so complicated. Maybe for similar reasons as why I love Moonlight. It's like it's such a complicated story where a person's motives are never completely clear. No one is completely good. No one is completely evil. I mean, you see that in a lot of her work, but Beloved is definitely, definitely my favorite.
Amena Brown:
I was thinking when you were talking about that clearing scene, I was like, "What if Toni Morrison's work makes me feel that feeling?" I think for me, it's the character of Pilate in Song of Solomon. I have actually mentioned this to a couple of friends to say as I think about my Black woman spirituality at this season of my life, I sort of imagine myself in certain ways how Pilate appears in that story. For those of you that haven't read it. I mean, everything that Toni Morrison writes, just go, just go read it.
Amena Brown:
But in Song of Solomon, if I'm remembering right, I would love to reread this again now. I also sort of entered Toni Morrison's work really in college. I had those initial encounters when I was younger. But when you're in college, you're now getting to read these texts and sort of pull certain things out of that and think about the themes. And you have other historical texts that may be sitting around that or other fictional texts sitting around that, which is something that I don't want to go back to some of how college was.
Amena Brown:
But that part I did love. I'm like, "I wouldn't want to write all the essays again. Maybe not that part." But the part where the books got to be in conversation with each other, I really loved that. And there was this sense in Song of Solomon that Pilate and her daughters who are technically aunt and cousin to these other male characters that we are hearing about, that they're sort of existing on the periphery of what is considered acceptable in the society of their town.
Amena Brown:
They, to me, seemed like these Black women with hairy legs and who will not shave an under arm, and who will dress however, they will dress. And it doesn't matter. Whatever is in fashion in the department store down there, we are here growing cabbage and growing collars outside of our house vibes. And I was like, "The older I get, the more and more I feel a little like that." I feel a little like I'm starting to... But I guess in a way, Cole, spiritually sort of looking at some of these characters in the same way that you were talking about this character in Beloved, there's something about Pilate being this Black woman with no belly button. Ugh, Toni Morrison. And we have this question of-
Cole Arthur Riley:
I remember that.
Amena Brown:
... does she birth herself? Is that why she has no belly button? And we're not given any explanation as to why. It is not really addressed pretty much at any point later in the book. There's a lot of other things going on, but I just gravitated to her and just thought spiritually, what does that mean? What does it mean? What are the ways a Black woman gives birth to herself? What does that look like?
Cole Arthur Riley:
Wow.
Amena Brown:
That a writer could make you contemplate those things. It's amazing. When I was just reading you writing about Beloved in This Here Flesh, and even some of that terminology of This Here Flesh sort of coming back to us from Toni Morrison, I just thought I resonate with that Cole. I resonate with how to me your book and what you were talking about there in Beloved are in conversation. Did you feel that way too?
Cole Arthur Riley:
Yes. I mean, I was hoping. It's a tall order. It's hard to approach her work because for so many of us she's just hero. But I knew if I'm going to write a book that contains Christianity, I need to really be faithful to the way Black literature has spiritually formed me. I wanted to be faithful to the entirety of my spiritual formation, which exists in and outside of a Christian tradition. It included Black literature. It included my family who aren't overtly religious.
Cole Arthur Riley:
So I needed to pull in things like storytelling and things like myth even so that it felt true. My dad, he's such a big part of the book. He wouldn't say he's a Christian. So how could I write a book that contains so many of his stories and these sacred artifacts and have the book contained by Christianity alone. It just didn't feel right. I needed to incorporate these other things. And in that way, I was able to approach people like Morrison and really figure out, "Man, what did this do to me? How is this a sacred text to me?"
Cole Arthur Riley:
Who are people in my life who are going to be terrified to hear that this is a sacred text to me? Do I care? Do I want them in the writing room with me? So yeah, it brought up a lot of good questions.
Amena Brown:
I love that. I want to ask also... I guess I have a question that sort of comes with a comment or a reflection on something I also loved about the way you chose to approach spirituality and spiritual practice in this book. I really loved that. It seemed like there was this space for the reader like, "If you're here, reader, and Christian tradition is what you ascribe to, you're welcome. If you're here, reader, and you don't ascribe to that at all, you're welcome. If you're here, reader, and you used to ascribe to that, and now you've got lots of questions and tensions here, you're welcome to.
Amena Brown:
And I think that's a wonderful gift in a book that wants to bring sort of questions and beauty and tensions of spirituality to the table to be that welcoming that in a text people would feel like they can come to the page there wherever they are. Was that something that as you were writing felt intentional on your part? Or did you feel as you were bringing your family stories, your own stories of formation that, that was just a present theme for you as well?
Cole Arthur Riley:
It was intentional because I've read books by authors who are Christian, not kind of are trying very hard to teach you what to think and what to believe. I think maybe if Christianity didn't have the history that it did, that would feel less problematic. But because it's been so perverted in and through white supremacy, I had to. I really wanted to push myself to be honest about all of my uncertainties.
Cole Arthur Riley:
The thing about how whiteness moves in spiritual spaces, specifically in Christianity is that supremacy that it craves in terms of politics, in terms of socioeconomic power, it also craves in terms of religion. It doesn't just want to have a spirituality. Spirituality needs to be Supreme. It needs to be the best thing. It needs to be the right thing.
Cole Arthur Riley:
And so, so much of Christian formation in certain spaces is about convincing you that you are right. This is right and yes, these other things aren't right. I think that's completely a symptom of White Supremacy and mostly that. I just resist that. I reject that. I don't want that to be my spiritual formation. That's hard conditioning that a lot of us have endured that your spiritual belief system has to be above in order for it to matter, in order for it to be meaningful.
Cole Arthur Riley:
I've always been a skeptic. The thing that my family says about me is they'll say, "Nicole was born a skeptic. You came out a skeptic." From the time I was a child, and I've always been a very uncertain person, a very like, "Maybe it's this. Maybe it's that." And to be honest about that and writing this first book was really important because ultimately I'm going to have to answer to myself, my 50-year-old self, my 60-year-old self.
Cole Arthur Riley:
I want to be able to look back and say, "I told the truth." I probably said some things that were wrong. I probably said things that I won't believe anymore by the time I'm 60. But did I tell the truth? And that became the lens through which I wrote like, "Are you telling the truth about you with the information that you have and the experiences that you've had to this point?"
Cole Arthur Riley:
And as long as I did that, I had that kind of fidelity to self. I feel like I was able to write very compassionately toward readers who really don't know what they think, who really don't know what they believe, but they've been trained to think that they're supposed to know all of these things with certainty.
Amena Brown:
Do you have a favorite spiritual practice right now or in this season of your life?
Cole Arthur Riley:
Yes. I have complicated feelings about this spiritual practice. I've criticized it actually. It's silence. I think there are a lot of valid critiques that I share about silence as a spiritual practice, especially for those of us who have been silenced by the societies that were being brought up in my whiteness.
Cole Arthur Riley:
So I have a complicated relationship with silence because I was not a very verbal child. I talk about that in the book some. I had something called selective mutism, which is a childhood anxiety disorder essentially, which makes it very difficult to speak around strangers.
Cole Arthur Riley:
So I've always had a very tricky relationship with silence. It always felt like something I needed to overcome and conquer, but in this season it's been really healing for me to try to find some good. Was there something special in those moments of silence that I shared with myself as a little girl? Maybe there was something that was all about insecurity and anxiety, but also was there something else there, something I was listening to in myself that a way that I became nearer to myself? So anyways, I've been trying to practice a redemptive silence and it feels really empowering.
Amena Brown:
I love that. I love adding the word, redemptive to that, redemptive silence, which is sort of a finding sometimes a fresh way or a different way, and maybe a different way than maybe what we were taught of how we use silence or how we're supposed to embrace that or not. All the things. I love the idea that even finding new or different ways to do that can be redemptive.
Amena Brown:
I want to read a quote from your book. You wrote, "Joy, which once felt as frivolous as love to me has become a central virtue in my spirituality. I am convinced that if we are to survive the weight of justice and liberation, we must become people capable of delight and people who have been delighted in." I love that. What's bringing you joy right now?
Cole Arthur Riley:
Well, reading usually brings me joy, but specifically I'm reading two books. I'm reading Pleasure Activism and I'm reading Black Joy by Tracey Michae'l Lewis-Giggetts. There's an M in there, I think. I'm reading Black Joy. Anyway, it's a bright yellow book read in Black lettering. Everyone should go out and buy it at a local bookstore. I mean, that book in particular, both of those books in different ways are bringing me joy because they're really giving me permission to experience joy in the ways that feel right to me as opposed to mimicking the joy around me.
Cole Arthur Riley:
And I think just like many emotions, although I think joy is something bigger than an emotion, but I think like many other emotions in my life, I can tend to mirror them in other people as opposed to actually having them originate in me and emanate out. Instead it's like they come to me and they rest on my skin. But they don't ever really get in.
Cole Arthur Riley:
I think that's what Joy's been for so long. And both of those books is just telling me it's okay. What does this look like for you? And for me, it might not look like my sister, who's very, very verbal and very charismatic and just so fun. And for me, it looks like more peace. It looks like sitting and staring at something beautiful and trying to find some sense of peace and trying to be honest about the things that I delight in as opposed to hiding from them.
Amena Brown:
I also want to ask you this question related to joy as well. As people read This Here Flesh, what do you hope they understand about the connection between joy and liberation?
Cole Arthur Riley:
I hope that they would understand that the journey toward liberation and deeper liberation, it doesn't need... Your liberation isn't bigger. It's not deeper, the deeper your trauma is or something like that, which I think we never articulate that necessarily. But I think that those are the stories we're given. The ending is better because of the depth of the pain.
Cole Arthur Riley:
I used to think that. Sadly, I don't think that anymore. I think we will not get there. I don't think we'll get there. I'm not talking about liberation as linear. I mean, I won't get there on a day to day basis. I can't approach it if I don't have some kind of habits and systems set up in my life that will keep me from despair.
Cole Arthur Riley:
Because I think liberation demands that we become very honest about the pain and about the terrors, it demands kind of an unflinching awareness of all those things. If you're really telling the truth, if you're really paying attention to the pain, I find it very difficult to believe that you can approach liberation without first becoming succumb by despair.
Cole Arthur Riley:
I think joy keeps us from that. I think we're seeing this explosion in the past few years of literature, of art, of content, if you want to call it that online, that is kind of just pulling. You see something different that's pulling on Black people in the wake of the summer of 2020, for example, and what was pulling at other people.
Cole Arthur Riley:
There was this sinister kind of hunger for pain awaken in some people. But then I saw my Black friends. There was this appetite for joy. And people didn't understand it. They didn't know what to do with the memes and the videos, and like, "How could you do this now?" And it's like, "Well, you don't know. This is how we've survived and we have inherited this. We have inherited this very rich system of joy as a means, not for just survival, but also thriving and flourishing. Anyways, that was a bit of a rant, but-
Amena Brown:
I love a good rant.
Cole Arthur Riley:
... as someone who's demeaned joy for so long, I feel like I'm speaking to myself.
Amena Brown:
Yeah. I love a good rant, Cole. So anytime you have a rant, I'm always here for that. I keep a little rant in my pocket just because you never know when you need one. Just need a little rant sometimes. That's all Cole, how can the people stay connected to you and your New York Times best selling book and your work? Tell me where the people should go.
Cole Arthur Riley:
This Here Flesh, it's available anywhere books are sold, but preferably a local Black owned bookstore. You could buy it there. That just does extra work really. And then you can find me at colearthurriley.com and there will lead you to any social media that you have, that you want to follow. But you can also sign up for my newsletter where I'll share if I have articles published places.
Amena Brown:
Go to there, people. Go to there and do those things. Cole, what an honor to get to speak with you today. It's been so great.
Cole Arthur Riley:
My honor.
Amena Brown:
I'm so excited. I'm so excited, so thank you for being here with us in the HER living room. I cannot handle the spice of those flaming hot Doritos, but I would be with you while you had some, while we're here in the living room.
Cole Arthur Riley:
Solidarity.
Amena Brown:
Yes, I would do that. I would be here with you. So thank you so much for joining.
Amena Brown:
HER With Amena Brown is produced by Matt Owen for Sol Graffiti Productions as a part of the Seneca Women Podcast Network in partnership with iHeartRadio. Thanks for listening. And don't forget to subscribe, rate and review the podcast.