Part I: Everything is Now

|| the bitter//sweet project || chapter one: san//kofa

2025 was the year of Sankofa for me. Sankofa is an Akan word from Ghana that roughly translates to “go back and get it” and is visually represented by a bird looking backwards.

The meaning of the phrase is to examine one’s past to understand the present and future. It highlights how the past is always present, and the present is always future– the gears of time already in motion long before we can realize where we lie in their tread.

A disciple of the lessons taught by serendipity, I have come to note the many different places that this word has begun to reveal itself to me in the time since I started this project, and consider the importance of these sightings. December 4th, 2025, Maryland-born rapper Redveil released his album “sankofa” which highlighted themes of examining cultural and personal history, and celebrating Black aesthetics in order to discover a deeper sense of self.

Starting in January and into February of 2026, I found myself reading a book called “When Trees Testify” by Beronda L. Montgomery, a Black botanist who explores the histories of a number of trees in America and their ties to Black and Indigenous legacies of agricultural and spiritual knowledge. In highlighting the connection between Black people and the natural histories of the world, the book also stresses the inherent connection between humans and the natural world.

How the cycles of breath and exhalation between humans and the plant world result in an intrinsic connection between our beings, which in turn is symbolic for how our survival and stories result from an interplay of dependency. That a sickness in the environment will result in a sickness of the self, and vice versa.

In the final chapter of the book, the author talks about the reasons and inspiration behind crafting this book, and in it mentions the word “Sankofa”, saying “ Indeed, the writing of this book has been a difficult, albeit deeply rewarding, journey – a journey of ‘Sankofa’... this retrieval has a purpose– to bring what you have retrieved into a present community and a future one that can be enriched by the gifts.”(Montgomery, Pg. 223).

Beyond the magical serendipity of the moment, I was struck by the sense of recognition I felt upon reading the reasons behind her writing this book and finding a resonance with how this project began. A deep and unabating hunger for a return to the past as a way of finding a path through the future. Before the table of contents, the book begins with a quote by Maya Angelou, stating

“History, despite its wrenching pain

Cannot be unlived, but if faced

With courage, need not be lived again.”

As I read more history and watch as the thread of my own story weaves into its fabric, I cannot help but feel that the reliving of history is inevitable.

With proper preparation and systems of remembering, we will be more prepared for when history whiplashes into darkness. There is a comfort in knowing that this cycle of remembering has not only awakened in others but is also taking them along the same pathways of knowledge I have encountered.

I have been an avid reader since I was nine, but the older I got, the more guilty I felt that the only books that interested me were fantasy worlds full of dragons, aliens, and prophecies.

People have learned that I read a lot and said things along the lines of “Oh wow, you must be very smart!” Maybe, but it wouldn’t have been for knowing how Artemis Fowl outsmarted the Faerie realm in the latest Eoin Colfer book I’d read, or what witch coven Manon Blackbeak crushed in her ascent to power in Sarah J Maas’ “Throne of Glass” series.

Towards the tail end of 2024, and for the entirety of 2025, I suddenly found it very hard to read anything that wasn’t directly connected to the world around me. One of the books I read was “Everyone Who Is Gone is Here” by Jonathan Blitzer, and it begins with a poem by Humberto Ak’bal titled “I Walk Backwards.”

Now and then

I walk backwards.

It is my way of remembering.

If only I walked forward,

I could tell you

About forgetting

“Walking Backwards” - Umberto Ak’bal

This poem perfectly encompasses the feeling that consumed me that year. Too often, when history is discussed, it is done as a review of a disconnected past moment, rather than a direct trailway to our present reality. I was watching a country in the act of forgetting, performing its work: promoting false histories, peddling snake oil, and erasing people. Destructive policies cloyed the spring air like pollen, hateful legislature burned through the summer haze, and cataclysmic news rained down in the fall.

The world around me fell deeper into fantasy and escapism; Suzanne Collins released the wildly successful “Sunrise on the Reaping” set in the familiar and dystopic world of “The Hunger Games” series, and a new Sci-Fi series called “Dungeon Crawler Carl” hit the market like a tsunami, the success of the first book creating a rapid demand for the entire series that quickly achieved mass printing and acclaim. The Romantasy genre was also seeing another boom, carrying over the momentum from authors like Sarah J Maas and Rebecca Yarros in 2024, and opening up to spotlight newer authors like Rachel Gillig and Danielle Jensen.

A lifetime fan of fantasy, I found myself with my face pressed up against the window, watching as my friends excitedly discussed books that would’ve sparked my interest and excitement just a year ago, but couldn’t seem to hold my attention. Though I still managed to sneak in some escapist literature like Cassandra Clare’s “Ragpicker King”, for the most part, I felt too paranoid and upset to read what I saw as mostly escapist fiction.

With that said, fiction has never been solely about escapism for me, and this year, more than most, I felt that the fiction I read needed to be connected to some critical issue I needed to work through in my own life. For that reason, some of them will make appearances throughout this project, carrying with them the serendipitous importance produced by the time I encountered them.

How the explorations on creation and change given in Nnedi Okorafor’s “Death of the Author” emerged into a world bracing against the world of AI saturation, and the lessons about the fickle relationship between truth and legacy within Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu’s “The Creation of Half-Broken People” came at a time when the federal government engaged in some of the brashest and ham-fisted efforts at actively erasing and rewriting history.

I felt that if I turned my attention from the world too long, by the time I chose to look back, a day, a week, a fortnight later, it might not be recognizable to me anymore. It felt like I was watching a great wheel turning with me directly in its path; that reality was changing faster than I could keep up with.

It wasn’t as if I had lived in some fanciful state where I somehow believed that America was not an imperialistic and capitalistic world power, built upon centuries of complex racist and classist hierarchies. I mean, I’m Black. Like, Black Black. Like my grandfather was a Black Panther that COINTELPRO had a file on Black. Like my grandmother is a high priestess in the Ausar Auset society Black.

Not only that, but I had already lived through the first Trump presidency, though it was far more bumbling and scatterbrained than his second term, so it wasn’t even that I hadn’t experienced a hyper-conservative anti-Black/nonbinary/immigrant ect. national tone before. I was also aware that Black death has been a fuel source for America since its inception, and is often the unacknowledged casualty that is assumed as the cost of progress, advancement, or inescapable tragedy.

What struck me the second time was how hate could be channeled so effectively into getting people to vote against their interests. The large monetary interests that back these hateful ideas, and the powerful figures who have long been invested in perpetuating them. It was the degree of money that I could openly see influencing politics, and how many of these same figures were responsible for providing information to the public, crafting the story we call reality.

It is one thing to be told your whole life that the chaos you see is a result of cycles of deliberate and systemic maladies, and it’s another to grow old enough to watch the cycles begin to perform their dances yourself.

With this realization came my desire to read nonfiction, starting with history. Every day felt like I was living in the midst of a prophecy the world had forgotten to heed, and I was hungry to find it for myself. As the waves of history crashed into my news cycle: Israel’s genocide in Palestine, the ties between U.S. Foreign Policy and the Immigration crisis, the ballooning opioid crisis, the privatization of healthcare, the dissolution of the Department of Education, etc.

I had the sensation of suddenly waking in the midst of a storm. A profound understanding that I stood amidst the crossways of generational struggles and machinations, and I was desperate to find a place in this world that didn’t place me within the grindstone of capitalism.

All this happening in the midst of the A.I. boom cultivated a deep need to place my palms on knowledge directly; to delight in the tedium of sifting through the knowledge, hungry fingers collecting history beneath my nails, smearing the stories into my skin. I felt that I needed to create my own web of intrinsic knowledge as an anchor for the misinformation and confusion of the world. And so began an unprecedented year of nonfiction reading and writing that spanned from topics like gardening to Black performance to gender identity, with the intrinsic ties between these wide-ranging topics solidifying themselves in my mind with each read.

What initially started as a scattering of half-formed personal essays working out my frustrations with the world eventually morphed into this project. It is a record of my experience this year, but if I am right, it will also be a reminder of what came before, and a mark of what is to come. A guide to steady myself historically and spiritually, marking not only this pivotal time in history, but also for myself personally. Tying together the major media of the time as well as my individual experience, I will paint a picture of one of the most bizarre years in my life.

Everything is Now

My family and close friends are always quick to tell people, “Oh you know what? Aingkhu is a published author!” Embarrasing me to no end as the person in question turns to me with curious eyes and skeptical brow and ask me if it is true and I respond with “yea its technically true, but it’s a chapbook that I printed myself as a part of a school project’ – During which I am usually cut off by a “oh shut up, no one asked you to explain all that!” Or a “and? that ‘s still published!” I love my people…but I will still cringe every time they do it. It is a cycle I have come to respect like how the moon’s gaze causes the tides to both pull and shrink with equal fervor.

Their point in calling attention to my high school Senior chapbook is to make sure that I maintain my pride in my artistic creations, which I do. My reasons for cringing are not because I do not find beauty in what I created, it is just that I am super conscious of all the errors and complications that I also have love for, but am not necessarily comfortable with others staring at to critique.

Denver School of the Arts (DSA) is a highly competitive school that requires an audition process to get admitted. It’s a middle school and high school combined, resulting with many kids spending as many as seven or eight years with the same kids in the same majors, with an intermittent coming and going of students like me along the way.

It was also a school that was extremely, extremely white. How white? Apparently, the racial discrepancy in the school makeup had greased the wheels on my application, and I was admitted to the school without the traditional auditioning process. Despite my many hours anguishing over how I would perform in the audition after my father informed me of it, one day he came into my room and casually informed me with a brief “Congratulations! You’re in!” and that was it.

I didn’t know this at the time, but the school was located in Park Hill, not far from the neighborhood where my father grew up in the 70s and 80s. Since moving to Denver, I learned that my father grew up in a house on Vine Street and attended the Loyola Catholic School that sits a mere block away from where I live now. When we first moved into this house, my father took my siblings and me to City Park, a park that I now walk through daily with my dog Chunka, and showed us a tree that he had planted in the park as a part of a youth program he was in as a child.

What stands in its place today is a grand arboreal tower, gorgeous and vibrant, ever-present and ever-changing with the seasons. The hopeful seed that my father made home for all those years ago is now nothing more than a memory, a story for him to pass down to us so that we might know the importance of beginnings. Had he never told us that story, I perhaps would not have taken the time to take notice of the different trees that I now walk amongst every day, and wonder at their stories.

My family talks often about how much the area has changed in the past few decades. How the Five Points neighborhood, a few blocks west of my house, was once known as the “Harlem of the West” due to the number of Black businesses that ran down there, now squeezed by the explosive growth of downtown Denver and pockmarked by the usual paramours of gentrification: coffee shops and yoga studios.

A couple of miles east of my house, brushing shoulders with DSA, separated only by Quebec St, is the town of Stapelton, named after Benjamin Stapelton, the mayor in the early to mid-90s who was a member of the Ku Klux Klan and ran with their backing, and went on to serve a total of five terms in office.

Entering the school, ignorant of it though I was, I was arriving at the nexus of several legacies that were in process and continue to be. The next year, my Senior year, I would be joining a student governmental organization called YAALL that was an initiative organized by Denver Public Schools to get student input on how to address key minority issues across schools in the district. The impetus for all of this work was something called the Bailey Report, which was a report created by Dr. Sharon Bailey, reporting on the high levels of turnover and burnout for teachers of color in DPS.

At DSA, I didn’t have any Black teachers. That year, I took a class called African-American Literature taught by Mr. Mills, a lanky middle-aged White man with a trademark deadpan sarcasm, paired with a deep sincerity that won over his students quickly.

It was the first year that African-American Literature was being offered as a course, and it was because Mr. Mills had been pushing ardently for the class, and though the school eventually capitulated, the task of actually teaching the class fell to him. Though he lamented being a White man instructing a class about the Black experience, he had a genuine love and passion for the literature, and I have always been deeply grateful to the pieces he introduced me to at that time. It was in Mr. Mills’ class that I read works like Corregidora and Song of Solomon, stories that I still think about to this day. And that I found an instructional space created for me to consider my ontological Blackness.

It was during this time, from 2015 through 2016, that Donald Trump first launched his presidential campaign and eventually won, and I was exposed to a prominent national anti-Black and xenophobic sentiment in the United States. I was one years old when my family first moved to Ghana, and we moved back to the United States in 2011, during the Obama years. Never had I heard America proud to be racist on such a national scale. It was the first time that I felt myself become “The Negro Problem” in America.

Being an art school, DSA students had to select an artistic focus like Dance, Choir, Stagecraft etc. that would be the locus of their studies. I was in the Creative Writing program, and among both the middle school and high school creative writing programs, there were only 3 other African-American kids in it, and as the fourth, I was their only male, and would be all the way up until I graduated the next year.

Strapped with the immense privilege of coming from a community that surrounds the school but just can’t seem to enter it, I strode my way right in. I say this all to outline how much of an outlier I was, and felt like coming into the school– I was astonished and terrified.

One of the longest-standing traditions for Creative Writing majors at DSA was a project called Senior Chapbooks, representing the final and most anticipated hurdle for the underclassmen slowly working their way towards graduation.

I remember this senior project was something I had heard spoken about my entire time there, but lacking context and care I never really took note of it. I had moved to Colorado the summer of 2015 from Atlanta, right after my father remarried, starting my Junior year at DSA later that year in August. I was much more concerned with trying to get my feet under me than trying to anticipate some distant project I had no frame of reference for. Of course, had I paid more attention, I might have been more prepared for a project that most of my classmates had been preparing for for years.

“Truth, Lies, and Other Strange Myths.” I am someone who often finds it difficult to decide on titles that I feel satisfy me. It is one of the subtle writing skills that earns my respect when I read other writers’ works. If I hadn’t had a strict deadline placed into the dirt, I am convinced the title might still be floating in the ether somewhere, along with many of the pieces within its pages. This means that it also bears all the awkward imperfections that would have kept it in the vault: blocky shoulders of stiffly written passages, and a face pockmarked by careless typos.

No matter the hundreds of times I had read over and edited my chapbook in our creative writing room’s Adobe InDesign program, it’s still rife with errors that make my stomach contract with embarrassment every time I read it. (One story I literally called the “The Sniffer”. Yuck!)

As I said, DSA was an arts school that often grew their students’ artistic pursuits for years, with many of the milestone projects, assignments, and performances being well known and eagerly anticipated by the students. This is especially true of the Senior projects because they represent the culmination of all your work over the years.

Of course, we were all artists, so regardless of the time people had for preparation, we all spent many hours in conflict over what was good enough to be included. What fit our themes, what said what needed to be said, and what would be too much? What would rot with time when left in the archive of old projects that the teachers kept, rediscovered years later to haunt all the improvements you’d made since?

Many of these kids were sifting through half a decade of writings, ideas, and concepts to sharpen into their springboard statements to dive into the world. I had two years of writing exercises and creative ventures that I had been using to doggie paddle my way through the coursework. I loved literature and wanted to improve my writing craft, but I had no particular story that I felt compelled to tell or that I felt measured up to any of the literature I enjoyed or admired.

I had always been a major fiction reader, and this often found itself reflected in my writing, but the class had forced me to leave my comfort zone and attempt some nonfiction pieces in the class that I had become proud of.

The eventual title of my chapbook was “Truth, Lies, and Other Strange Myths.” It was supposed to represent the totality of what the chapbook had to offer people: a blend of fact and fiction, underwritten with a promise for storytelling and wonder. Had I more time to agonize over the title, I would have most likely produced a collection of mythic short stories haunted by a legacy of indecision and absent of artistic risk; stunted, clipped, and polished in all the wrong places by my insecurities.

Instead, the chapbook I produced is a gorgeous blend of all the flavors I had sampled in my time there, that had left stains on my fingertips and kernels between my teeth. It is poetry, prose, poetic prose, fictional and nonfictional, and this amalgam is the truest representation of the artist that I was at the time and, in many ways, the artist I will always be. All my favorite prose is poetic. All my favorite poems hold stories.

I have learned a similar lesson with chronology over the years. That both the past and future rest beneath my feet at all moments. I have often tried to shape the imprint of my thoughts and memories into a linear timeline when writing about my life, but this has rarely felt like an inadequate method. I do not experience time in the segmented increments we are required to measure it in. When it comes to meaning, many moments and lessons exist without temporal limitation.

In the same way that discarding the rigid monovision I initially created for my chapbook allowed me to let it grow into itself, I am dispensing with the straight line of chronology to tell a story that I feel stretches itself to every phase of my current being.

Over the years, I have come to appreciate the title more and more. I see the lessons taught to me by the circumstances that brought about its creation continue to repeat themselves in my new works and life. How Black stories are often a blend of fact and fiction, existing in a space of ontological liminality in the larger story of America, an eye floater in its iris, glanced away from, ignored, and quickly moved to the periphery when gazed at directly for too long.

“Beloved” by Toni Morrison, “Native Son” by Richard Wright, and Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man” are all stories of fiction that peer into the dark shadows of the history books, using imagination to rescue truth in a time when many of those stories went unacknowledged. I am my ancestors’ dreams, and the world I exist within is the result of Black imagination. How much of Blackness and Black life occurs in myth? How much of the future is mythmaking? How much of the survival of African-Americans came from imagining a moment for ourselves beyond our surroundings?

When I was about 17 years old, my father told my friends and me that the word “picnic” was derived from the phrase “pick-a-nigger” when white folks would find a Black person to lynch for these events. I, being who I am, later went to look into the word and found that the word actually comes from the French word “pique-nique,” from the 1700s, and precedes the popular lynching practices of the Reconstruction Era, as my father had indicated.

I don’t bring that up to show an example of a time my father was wrong about something, but instead to highlight an important aspect and approach of Black storytelling. While not etymologically correct, the story that my father told my friends and me about the word highlighted a truth that most wouldn’t encounter if one were introduced to the word’s legacy. The deep historic ties between spectacle and Black death are something that isn’t a focus for many in America outside of the Black community.

In fact, Black death is often purposely overlooked or erased from the narratives of the dominant culture. While my father’s story didn’t tell a straightforward truth, its construction ensured that I would be equipped as a Black man for the connotative implications of the word, as well as the personal importance it could hold for me.

This is a common element of Black storytelling, often obscured in metaphor and euphemism to disguise our knowledge from cultures that seek to control or stamp it out. This can be seen in the current censored messaging surrounding anti-colonialism, anti-apartheid, and anti-capitalist thought that has been the inheritance of my culture for generations, which still struggles to see the light in an age of much freer access to information.

This project, and every project of my life, is a labor of love for stories and all that they have given to me: the gifts of perspective and vocabulary, the lessons of patience and practice.

The wonder of chronomancy, shrinking time to the shoulder-width of a page, pulling voices through the veil of time, braided in conversation to create the music we call knowledge.

As I hungered for the stories of resilience and perseverance that year, I became thankful for the many great writers who endeavored to record the truths they witnessed in their worlds: Assata Shakur, James Baldwin, Zora Neale Hurston.

Absorbing these stories impressed upon me an urgency to record a world that had become a waterfall of cataclysmic news, finality rushing through my fingers to sit on the pile of unfolded laundry we call yesterday’s problems.

It awoke in me the awareness that the world rejected many of these stories in their time, too, and that writing would be the way I wove my truth into the seams of a world so determined to drift apart.

Throughout this project, you will hear me delve into a passage on environmentalism whilst in the midst of a discussion about gender roles, and you will follow along with me as I interrupt a discussion on the current wave of AI to discuss the vampires and immortality.

Across these various essays, you will see me cite the same texts over and over again, using the lessons within them to engage in discussions across different, seemingly distant, subjects. The purpose of doing this is to hopefully impress upon you how interconnected these ideas are, each influencing the other as ecosystems behave.

Works Cited

Blitzer, Jonathan. Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here: The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis. Penguin Books, 2025.

Montgomery, Beronda L. When Trees Testify: Science, Wisdom, History, and America’s Black Botanical Legacy. Henry Holt & Company, 2026.