writer zeba blay on what she's reading & our mother's day recs
monthly recs #50
Each month, we ask a writer to share what’s on their minds and in their open tabs for our monthly recommendations. This May’s guest curator is , a culture and film critic born in Ghana and based in NYC. Formerly Senior Culture Writer at HuffPost, her writing has also appeared in Allure, Film Comment, ESSENCE, The New York Times, Filmmaker Magazine, Shadow and Act, The Village Voice, Indiewire, and the Webby Award-winning MTV digital series “Decoded.” In 2021 she published a debut book of cultural criticism, Carefree Black Girls (also the name of her newsletter).
I’m writing this in an ER waiting room, at the tail end of Mercury, Mars, and Venus retrogrades that really had me fighting for my life (both literally and figuratively) for the past few months. The art of survival has been, shall we say, a running theme for the year thus far. We’re all living our little lives, going through our individual trials and crises, but then there’s the collective survival that we’re negotiating as well. I mean, it’s not looking too good out there, babes. Vibes are bad. People are struggling. The fascism we have quite frankly been living under for longer than some care to admit is only intensifying.
In other words, a world is ending. It remains to be seen what world, in fact, that is. I’ve been asking myself what it means to live on the brink of endings that are also beginnings. What if the world ending doesn’t have to be fatalistic, but rather a call to attention? A rupture that allows space for other things to grow?
There are versions of the world I am ready to let go of. Worlds shaped by extraction, cruelty, the myth of scarcity. Worlds built on loneliness, on comparison, on false outrage, on apathy, on endless scrolling. If something has to end — and surely something must — it might be the illusion that we are separate from one another, or from the land, or from the past.
When I think about the future I want, I think about care. Not the aesthetics of care, but the daily, small sustaining act of it. I think about the stories I want to tell. I think about the people in my life who still find ways to create, to love, to reach for something beyond survival even as everything shifts beneath them. I think about what it means to hope — not as delusion, but as commitment.
zeba blay’s
1. Speaking of survival, I’ve been returning to my sis Fariha Roisin’s beautiful poetry in Survival Takes A Wild Imagination a lot these days, particularly the poem “This Is for Everyone Who Had to Make a Family out of Themselves.”
2. My dear friend Akwaeke Emezi recently published their ninth (!) novel, Somadina, and it is the West African YA fantasy novel my inner-adolescent has been yearning for all my life.
3. Two card decks I’ve been really loving: Yumi Sakuwaga’s Cosmic Comfort deck, filled with “tender and grounding meditations from the Universe,” and the artist Jazsalyn’s Warpmode card game, a “conceptual card game and thought experiment” that provides prompts exploring the Black metatheories of Afrofuturism, Afronowism, Afrovoidism, and Afroapocalypse.
4. Some zines and chapbooks I love: “The Seeds This Soil Holds,” poetry and visual art that asks what grows after ruin by Keesean Moore; “Channeling,” a digital zine on finding creative flow by Jezz Chung; and “I Love You, Phillip Seymour Hoffman,” a lovely little interactive fanzine by Madison Inman.
5. I recently had the pleasure of attending my first Eid dinner, hosted by the Pillars Fund, where guests were sent home with Palestinian olive oil from the hills of the village Burin in the West Bank, cultivated by farmer Shireen Najjar. I really don’t have the words to describe how absolutely beautiful this oil is, so I won’t even try. It's sold here at Olive Odyssey.
paid subscribers can scroll down for more recs from zeba, including the show she calls “this generation’s Sex and the City” and the video that, she says, “sums up the key to life quite succinctly.”
more from us
6. As we start to look ahead to summer travel, we’re bookmarking these hotels: Berberlodge in Marrakech; Villa Ottone on Elba; Villa Rosmarino near Genoa; and Pagostas Guest House in Patmos.
’s Yolo Journal also has a great list of recs for hotels in the South of France (stay tuned for our upcoming interview with Yolanda later this month!).7. It can also be a good time to brush up on your language skills. We learned from Marianna that embassies, consulates, and cultural centers are a great place to seek out information if you’re looking to learn a new language. For instance, the Instituto Cervantes, a public institution created by Spain, offers Spanish-as-a-Second-Language courses in Spain and at centers around the world and the Japanese-American Society of Washington, D.C. offers online classes in Japanese.
8. passerby Dalia Al-Dujaili’s book Babylon, Albion is one to add to your preorder list — it’s a lyrical inquiry into what it means to be native to a particular place, drawing on a wide range of sources, including scientific papers, the work of artists, mythology, and her ow memory. We asked her to curate a reading list for those interested in the topic, to accompany her own. Her recs: Dispersals by Jessica J. Lee; Thin Places by Kerri ní Dochartaigh; Upstream by Mary Oliver; and The Library of Ancient Wisdom by Selena Wisnom.
9. With Mother’s Day right around the corner, consider visiting The Met to see Ilene Segalove’s “The Mom Tapes,” a meditative look at an earlier generation through the artist’s interviews with her own mother; reading Iman Mersal’s new book Motherhood and Its Ghosts about what hides in the archives of motherhood and its representation; and subscribing to Mother Tongue magazine, a biannual interrogation of modern motherhood, and Spread the Jelly, a new magazine aiming to deepen the cultural conversation around motherhood.
10. If you’re thinking about a seasonal refresh of your t-shirt collection, some good options come from Nu Swim, Gil Rodriguez, RLT, CO, and Cou Cou Intimates (paid subscribers get 20% off). You can also find our founder’s favorite t-shirt recs here.
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1. I really, really love this short story by Julian Robles: