Do Or Don’t
No one is likelier to rob, bully, blackmail, manipulate, or hit you, or inflict unwanted touch, than [biological] family…[the] family — predicated on the privatization of that which should be common, and on proprietary concepts of couple, blood, gene, and seed — is a state institution, not a popular organism. It’s at once a normative aspiration and a last resort: a blackmail passing itself off as fate; a shitty contract pretending to be a biological necessity. — Sophie Lewis, Abolish The Family: A Manifesto for Care and Liberation
A few years ago, after watching 1989’s Dead Poets Society
its themes of community through a
decentralized, formally academic exchange
of ideas in a classroom through the guidance
of the fervent, mellow Mr. Keating, broke this
lifeless, traditionalist mold of how people learned,
interacted with one another.
Neil’s controlling father, whom
I believed deserved a bullet to his head — and Neil
himself, whom I sympathized with, carried my feelings —
Get Patrick Jonathan Derilus’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
this ongoing motif of my own existential dilemmas —
until the movie’s end.
discouraged that he was left without
the intrinsic freedom to be who he wanted
to be, he thought it best to end his own life
than to live to a prescriptive lifestyle not created
from his own imagination, but by continued
subjugation of his caretakers
questions, aspirations, dreams thrusted into a grim,
grotesque certainty of a gun. Freedom yearned for,
Freedom stripped. In life and in death this becomes
a calling for Black youth to protest through inquiry
of imagination.
living, acquiring Purpose
with no fickle time constraints — be!
even without the first antagonists who
try to give a semblance of care — only
to take it away from you.
Lavi a twò kout pou yo ka kontwole mwen.
Like/love what you’ve read? Follow Patrick here.
Support Patrick’s writing:
cash.me | venmo | paypal
Patrick Jonathan Derilus is an American-born Haitian independent writer and Goodreads author who resides in Brooklyn, New York. Their pronouns are he, him, his, or they, them, theirs. They write poetry, short stories, and essays. They are published in RaceBaitR, Rabble Literature Magazine, Cutlines Press Magazine, Linden Avenue Literature Magazine, and elsewhere. They are the author of their 2016 anthological work, Thriving Fire: Musings of A Poet’s Odyssey and newest ebook, Perennial: a collection of letters.
