A Note From the Editors  

But as far as dream roles—I know this is so expected of me, but I would love to play Elphaba in “Wicked” on Broadway. I have a lot of dream roles, but that’s like my main one because of the vocal track. I love belting high things!

— Ariana Grande

It’s odd to write a letter right now when what we want are results. Still, we’re realizing that incomprehensibility is in the service of care; stories, performance, and play let us inhabit those worlds that are waiting to be grasped. It’s the 49th day of protests in NYC. Fireworks going off all hours of the night. Cops accidentally pepper-spraying themselves in the face. A hotter-than-ever summer while our collective health demands we stay inside AC-less apartments. The metaphor is no longer a metaphor: it allows us to think that this could be something else.

This is all to say: wicked is wicked, in its billion definitions. The modern wicked probably came from the Old English “wicca,” meaning witch, but in the late 19th century the noun became an adverb—at the exact same time as the inception of awful and terrible. In the twenties, wicked became a term of coolness or pizzazz, and 50 years later the intensifier hella emerged in the Bay Area. Perhaps the world became so severe and consuming that, as the tricks and superstitions of survival spilled over, words did too. Wicked might be how we describe the overwhelm of it all.

Wicked arises when all instructions are dropped. How do we carve out space within sadistic policies and uncompromising surveillance? In “Territory of the Moon Not the State,” Noemí Delgado writes about an association of Salvadoran parteras practicing under a state that seeks to manage death. “In the middle of the violence,” she explains, the parteras “guided life into this realm with love.” Trapping devices (hospitals, quarantine, computers, grammar) lend themselves to freedom too. In “Portrait of a Room,” Emma Irene writes about those mundane aspects of the everyday that adorn your personhood: the hanging happy plants, polished black shoes, and warm string lights that can become the totality of belonging. As Meerabelle Jesuthasan asks in “The Internet Is Not Forever,” an essay about the French cartoon site La Cartoonerie, “what real life? what outside?”

We think about the long legacy of abolitionists who have been imagining the what if for years, telling us that the something else always exists in the present tense. “Making things requires multiple directions, which is also to say no-direction is a good-direction,” writes the author of an anonymous correspondence. No direction, like being committed to something you can’t yet fully imagine; as Ivanna Baranova puts it in her poetry, “Failure necessarily takes the form of devotion.”

How do we make the unbelievable common?  In “The Irredeemable University,” current and former graduate workers of the UCs ask what it would mean to abolish everything. They tell us that the return of stolen land and resources—adamantly not a metaphor—might start with a feeling:

Of practicing freedom in spite of. Of finding freedom in each other. Of failing ourselves and each other often, and living in our imperfection. Of acknowledging what is incommensurable within and between our visions of freedom. Of lighting (metaphorical) fires and letting them spread without knowing if the world(s) we desire will be found in the ashes.

How do we write about the unintelligible? We know that we do not only read and hear language—we also watch it. Shannon Hafez’s piece, “invisible faces,” might suggest that performance admits self-excavation, but it also maintains that movement is a response: in dance, we’re able to slink through screens.

In a moment of symbolic political gestures meant to appease and distract, the problem of the metaphor is also blatant. In “The Perfect Slice of Cake,” a video by Leila Bartholet, obsessions and compulsions become a product of creative institutions: sterilization is a mechanism of aesthetic hierarchy, dis/embodiment a product of subjecthood. But Mark Nowak, in our discussion about his new book Social Poetics, points us in a different direction: the labor of art-making, he suggests, is itself an antidote to our currently dissolved labor practices. “Wicked will be the great social transformations we will rise up and fight for to rebuild the world again, not for the few, but for everyone,” he tells us. How can bridging the gap between the “I” and the “we” in our artistic practices work to reject co-optation? The collectivizing “we” of the #CoronavirusHaikus, a series of poems from members of Nowak’s Worker Writers School, insists that uprising protects the possibilities held by metaphor.

We’re honoring creation, and we’re also reminded each day that we live in a wickedly fatal world. What is the torture of not knowing? Mara Machete’s film, “Running on a Hiatus,” is a meditation on the long wait for Black relatives to return home. Talking with her family after the brutal murder of Ahmaud Arbery, she says, “I really feel it, like I know that person, because I do know that person.” We watch all four minutes and seven seconds slowly and attentively. We think of poet Evan Ifekoya’s prompt to “practice stillness as a matter of urgency.”

Like most things, wicked is also just a matter of perspective. There is nothing more wicked than the mischief of community autonomy—looking out for each other is seen as purposeless evil by the powers that be, but self-determination is all about joy, excitement, and pleasure. Each cultural worker featured in this issue has chosen a fund to accompany their piece. In the spirit of creating sustainable webs of care, we urge you to show your appreciation for their work with monetary support.

Language is changing, statues are falling, poetry refuses the bullshit tenants of normality; so, out of necessity, we share this collection with you. Every metaphor, threat, and idea should be taken literally. A lesson in meaning-making, the very word wicked is a house of mirrors.

—ATM