Magicking into Being

I like to say I make magic. I’m joking but not joking.I make magic because we are all unwell. My work builds from the foundation of what I call a pedagogy of unwellness: a disability justice recognition that we are all differentially unwell, that we are all unwell in different ways at different times in relation to enabling and disabling structures around us. Wellness as we’ve learned it, I’ve discovered, is something we’ve made up, an aspiration we are desperate to prove that we can achieve and then maintain.1 A yardstick to measure our failures. Because to not be well—to not be productive, to not achieve, to not be independent, to not pull your own weight, to need too much, to be a burden—is to fail as a person and then maybe we actually deserve all the pain we suffer. But if wellness isn’t the default, if we are all already unwell, then being unwell isn’t an indication of personal failings but a shared condition we can give ourselves permission to acknowledge. Maybe even care for. Because recognizing we are all unwell means recognizing we all need and deserve care, and lots of it.And what is magic if not an intervention into the world to create something we need that our existing structures cannot produce or even imagine? The magic I make is care.What kind of care is it that we need? I have begun finding the answers to that question at an unexamined intersection of the scholarly and the literary where a form of magic can begin. This magic is the literary and the scholarly come to life in new ways to build out what it is we need to survive in a world that systematically makes us unwell. This magic is an interrogation of wellness, reunderstanding it not as a telos but instead a continual engagement of personhood, of self in relation to structures of unwellness. To transform those structures, to ask them to make space for the fullest of personhood possible. The endless process of care by which we try to make life feel more livable, in all the ways we need, whenever we need.This magic is also, as all magic, creative, interactive, somatic. The kinds of encounters I stage and interactions I ask people to have with texts, with each other, with themselves, use the material, engage the body, and require participatory interpretative work. My projects approach personhood in multifaceted ways to give people new license for things that have been structurally unlicensed for their personhood: to receive care, to know their pain matters, to authorize themselves as experts, to diagnose their own suffering, to be agents in shaping themselves and their futures. To see and reach for a more expansive horizon. To know they are not alone.In this folio, I share selections from two projects that I created and curated with my partner, Lawrence-Minh Bùi Davis: the Asian American Tarot and the Book of Curses. The reimagined tarot cards are part of a larger mental health project called Open in Emergency (2016, 2019), a hybrid book-arts project bringing together over eighty contributors to directly engage questions of Asian American pain, need, and care.2 Created to trace the forces that shape our lives, the tarot cards place personhood in relation to complex structures of violence. They take scholarly, artistic, and community knowledges and alchemize those into a form that helps the reader actively shape not only their understanding of themself but also the decisions they might make. Cards are shuffled, chosen, flipped, read. Maybe even shared with others. Each card offers frameworks for understanding our relationships to structures; they also offer imperatives for how to move through the world going forward. Originally twenty-three but continually expanding to address evolving collective needs, these cards meet the reader where they are and take them to places they perhaps didn’t know they needed. Magic.Lawrence and I created the Book of Curses (2018) as a project to name and intervene in injustice, a different approach to creating the things we collectively need. Both diagnosis and treatment, the project approaches literature not simply as expression but also as mark on the world, liturgy and incantation to manifest. While the tarot project draws on the particular form of tarot and its modern use for divination, the Book of Curses draws on the Advent calendar, not as a gesture to Christian symbols per se but to that form’s temporal function of collectively counting down to a critically transformative event. Here the countdown requires the reader to engage not only the forms of personhood presented in the curses but also a different kind of agency for themself. The Book of Curses calendar counts us down to the world that we are dreaming—and cursing—into being, one that must be reached, at least in part, through magical means. The accompanying book holds twenty-five curses to be read, engaged, and perhaps enacted, together: open the boxes in the calendar, read the curses, trace the glyphs, burn the ritual paper. Activate something in the world. Through these curses we are agents, but we are also at the mercy of something beyond what we can usually see and hear and touch. This creation and this trust: magic.For this folio, I’ve chosen six tarot cards that deal specifically with death, with the relationship between extreme forms of unwellness and the structures around us. What is personhood on the edge of a cliff? More complex and containing more possibility than I think many of us realize. These cards show us what it looks like to peer so deeply into the abyss perhaps you are halfway in, already in, never coming out. What it looks like to peer out from the abyss. What it looks like to live with the abyss.For this folio, I’ve included the curse “Advent” calendar that accompanies the book as well as the opening pages that explain the project’s framing. I’ve chosen a selection of five curses across the twenty-five to show the breadth of what the contributors name as injustice and requiring magical intervention, and how they’ve imagined themselves in relation to both the injustice and the methods of intervention offered in the form of the curse. The abyss is wide and deep, containing a breathtaking array of violence and pain, and our spirits are breathtakingly creative in how we answer.Welcome to the magic I and my partner have figured out how to make. May it bring into being some of what you need

Art · Disability Rights and Representation · Philosophy · Posthumanist Ethics and Activism · Theatre and Performance Studies

• Making Mental Health through Open in Emergency

  Mimi Khúc•South Atlantic Quarterly•2021

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