What Linett has done- & is doing- is keeping the artform, holding it & passing it on to the next generation (she is an active mentor of women DJs), to speak back to the erasure that constantly shrouds us as Black women. That is not a small thing- it is radical. That is resistance in its most tender form & it is the same spirit that moves through the work I do.

Something people do not always understand about research like mine- research that is personal, ancestral, emotionally weighted- is that the environment in which you process & write it matters. It is not a luxury consideration. It is a methodological one. Sitting in a cafe in Zanzibar or Addis Ababa, laptop open, hot chocolate, fresh juice or tea arriving, music somewhere in the background or coming from my earphones- that is not indulgence.

Choosing to be a digital nomad at that moment- exhausted, over-extended, a one-woman team carrying some of the heaviest research of my life- was not a retreat. It was resistance. It was joy, chosen deliberately & without apology, as an act of defiance against every structure that had demanded my brilliance without protecting my humanity. I stopped fighting. & I lived instead.