Love Note #5: Embracing the Creative Weight of Justice

Libra Season and the Power of Artistic Expression

“We can impose beauty on our future.”— Lorraine Hansberry

“Never forget that justice is what love looks like in public.”― Cornel West

“What is the beauty of the haiku is that it is not simplistic. The beauty of the haiku I just said is very complex. It reaches all the complexities of our life on this Earth. Peace – that’s a very complex idea, peace, so we can’t get it as human beings.” — Sonia Sanchez

“I do not pretend to understand the moral universe. The arc is a long one. My eye reaches but little ways. I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by experience of sight. I can divine it by conscience. And from what I see I am sure it bends toward justice.” 

—Theodore Parker

“Everyone is familiar with the slogan "The personal is political" -- not only that what we experience on a personal level has profound political implications, but that our interior lives, our emotional lives are very much informed by ideology. We oftentimes do the work of the state in and through our interior lives. What we often assume belongs most intimately to ourselves and to our emotional life has been produced elsewhere and has been recruited to do the work of racism and repression.”  —Angela Y. Davis

When late September arrives, I can taste a sweetness in the air that demands to be observed and written down with precision. This is how I’ve come to understand the Libra (air, intellect, refinement) aspect of Venus through poetic form and structure. Libra builds on the Virgo/Mercury function of synthesizing and analyzing information efficiently by strategizing and refining ideas to make art. For Love Note #5, I was fully prepared to write about how Libra season coaxes haikus out of me, but instead, join me in exploring a singular Libran project: justice.

Above all, Libra's highest function is to find the middle ground between warring ideals. This task of bringing balance isn’t always a feel-good or cookie-cutter endeavor. Symbolized by scales, Libra’s glyph is the only symbol in the 12-sign zodiac that is represented by an inanimate object: a universal symbol of equilibrium. More than most, Libran energy is weighted by attaining inner and outer harmony.

So often, when we focus on the beloved Libras in our lives, we overemphasize how they may use their relational superpowers to be people-pleasers or are debilitated by chronic indecisiveness. The Libra archetype– the artist, peacemaker, mediator, counselor, socialite, or lover – teaches us to be relational with style and grace. Imagine the Libra child desperately wanting to quiet their arguing parents by not taking sides. The peacemaker friend wants to refuses to abandon either friend in the group fight. The consequences of fighting (and losing) the wrong battle are too great for them. To yearn for peace is to know intimately the horrors of war.

There is a social strategy to Libra’s deliberation. What is harmony within fundamentally oppressive and unjust systems? How can someone bring about balance in unequal power dynamics and prolonged terror? The Lover learns when a situation needs grace and when it demands justice. Peace without justice is hollow and fickle. To achieve justice, the real thing and not the pageantry of fairness, to have lasting peace in your spirit and soul, sometimes you must follow your heart, pick a stance, and wage war. When people have been wronged, Libra learns that ‘justice is love in action.’

I attended a conference last year, We Dream Worlds, and one conversation with Bayo Akomolafe excited me. Akomolafe, while reflecting on his participation on a panel with Pharrell Williams, offered a thought exercise on representation and Black excellence as a form of capture:

“…if we treat protest and speaking up and speaking truth to power as the technologies of emancipation, is it also possible to notice that voice does not belong to individuals? It's not that we're using the tool of voice to emancipate ourselves. There is a sense in which the voice is not tethered to the individual at all. That speaking up, or speaking truth to power can be a form of ecological ventriloquism… It could be a way that you know, even speaking at all, it is could be a way of capturing and reincarcerating and reinforcing and fortifying the very epistemologies, the ways of knowing that has led to our incarceration…”

Akomolafe’s reflection situates our yearning for recognition as Black artists, an innate and human need, within the larger context of dominant culture’s ability to subsume and swallow the very same vehicle that we intend to use as pathways to freedom.

For some, this involves mastering our ability to speak with nuance and specificity, not parrot or reinforcing the hegemonic ideals of existing power structures. For others, it may be simply acknowledging that notions of beauty are easily corrupted and co-opted by white supremacy, patriarchy, and capitalism.

This Libra season, I want to remind you that among the many expressions of Libran energy is the ability to harness art, poetic form, and structure to articulate the high stakes, conditions, and realities of peace. By refining and ordering our craft of choice, we can express nuance: the hues, timbres, and texture of conflict and war. The ultimate goal is to move beyond creating harmony to achieving justice. And with justice, one can begin to ‘impose beauty on the world.’