The Art of What’s Possible

An interview with Bed-Stuy Strong founder Sarah Thankam Mathews

Aliya Bhatia

Courtesy of Sarah Thankam Mathews and Bed-Stuy Strong

[Image description: A screenshot of a video call with members of Bed-Stuy Strong]

One year ago, as shelter-in-place orders were sent out across the world, Sarah Thankam Mathews had already entered week three of self-imposed quarantine. A New York winter, severe depression, and creative block was a combination powerful enough to render her a recluse. But, as the fiction writer and former progressive policy advocate remained inside, the virus was creeping up the shores of her many homes—from Kerala to Oman to her current landing spot in Brooklyn. Paradoxically, the threat of COVID pulled Sarah out of isolation. Drawing on ancestral legacies of care work, solidarity frameworks, and the Black Panthers’ free clinics, Sarah founded Bed-Stuy Strong, a group of neighbors in north Brooklyn who provide no-contact grocery deliveries for vulnerable members of their community. This past January, almost a year after Bed-Stuy Strong’s founding, Sarah announced her forthcoming novel, All This Could Be Different, from Viking Press.

In her organizing, as in her creative writing, Sarah credits her loved ones and favorite authors. Derek Smith, Hanna King, Alex Baldwin, George Farcasiu, Chris Xu, Semoy Williams, Unis Williams, Jackson Fratesi, Nia—some of her fellow organizers who, she emphasizes, all deserve their flowers. She later tells me: “In both organizing and creating literature, I believe it essential to grapple with who humans really are. That’s one of the great gifts literature can give us, real examinations of those things. That’s what reading Vivek Shanbag or Alice Munro, Ben Okri or Kazuo Ishiguro, can lend us.” Sarah’s work brings to mind Toni Morrison’s 2015 essay in The Nation about living through the re-election of George W. Bush. “In times of dread, artists must never choose to remain silent,” Morrison offers. “This is precisely the time when artists go to work. There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear.”

On a Monday afternoon in March, right after she ate a quick snack, Sarah and I spoke over video call about art-making, place-making, and world-building: the multimodal ways we bring better futures into the present.

—Aliya Bhatia

---

Aliya Bhatia: How would you describe yourself in your own words?

Sarah Thankam Mathews: I have finally started calling myself a writer, in the last six months to year. I would say I’m a writer and I organize sometimes. I would say I’m an immigrant, it’s a big part of my identity moving through the world. I grew up in post-colonies and that is how I experience myself: as a post-colonial subject. I would say that people have described me, to the point that I’m comfortable taking up their descriptions, as a thoughtful and curious person who is maybe motivated by the questions of imagination and justice.

You’re also the founder of Bed-Stuy Strong. I’m curious about what informs this type of mutual aid work—not just the many structural problems that Bed-Stuy Strong emerged out of but also the emotional and existential and creative factors behind your project.

Courtesy of Sarah Thankam Mathews

[Image description: Sarah, eyes closed, stands against a brick wall. She wears a black turtleneck and a green sweater with red detail.]

I have this theory, that many artists are not always conscious of what drives them. Quite often, creative people in the act of creation function as containers of other things, impulses of the muse, things they’ve learned and thought about or felt deeply for years. There are certain moments of catharsis or catalysis maybe. All of that comes to mind when I look back to a year ago. I had already been in my house, not seeing many people for a few weeks, because I was depressed and anxious. And because it was winter. And that’s a powerful combination. I should say that the writing project I was working on at the time was not working out, and I was feeling a lot of grief about that. Thoughts started materializing to me about how bad COVID’s social, relational, and infrastructural impacts would be. I was thinking about comparative perspectives of other countries, and was able to humanize some of the potential costs in ways that people who have not lived in other places perhaps could not. Thinking of my friends, my family, my elderly neighbors on the block—the human cost of that impact was terrifying.

It was really a matter of hours to synthesize the core idea of what became Bed-Stuy Strong. I arrived at a block-based honeycomb of different networks, all of which could be used for a variety of purposes, especially communication, amplification, and mutual aid. There’s always a gap between vision and execution—whether it’s writing, making art, or organizing, particularly organizing in an unconventional way.  It’s a learned maturity that many artists who have been practicing for a long time have to cultivate to embrace the gap, to let the actual thing become the thing it will become. As organizers, we were learning to bridge this gap too.

How have you come to embrace this gap?

I’m grateful for my past experiences in organizing and, simply, making. They allowed me, within Bed-Stuy Strong, to defer to and celebrate the leadership and gifts of others, to let things go a different way than I expected or even intended, to keep people and leftist political principles and inclusivity in my sightlines.

When it comes to the art-making of writing, which is not a deeply collaborative practice, I think of all the triumphs and failures in execution that belong much more squarely to you. Community, mentorship, and other readers still matter but, at the same time, you as the creator are very much the difference between something sinking or swimming.

In an art-based context, I often experience frustration, and a degree of sadness or recrimination with that gap. With Bed-Stuy Strong, though, what ended up happening was beyond my wildest imagining. It felt incredibly alive. An emergent network formed in real time, and not in a top-down way. The project very much felt like a container; people were chiming in and starting things and linking with each other.

One of the the pieces on mutual aid work that has stuck with me is Canadian writer Vicky Mochama’s piece in The Walrus about the history of mutual aid networks as something that belongs to generations of Black people, and Black women specifically—and as a system that has been employed in many immigrant and queer communities.

Absolutely. Bed-Stuy Strong does not belong to me; I do not take credit for the collective accomplishments of the network. People have practiced it for time immemorial. It exists in the village context, like the context it exists in in my hometown in Kerala. In the US, the history of its practice has always belonged to marginalized people: Black people, Native people, queer and trans people. Mutual aid should exist, should flourish, should continue to flourish.

I’m glad you touched on the vastness of Bed-Stuy Strong as an organism that, in your words,“felt alive.” How do you understand this vitality in relation to the future of solidarity and care that we practice in the present?

The short answer is I don’t know, but our first milestones meant the most. The first week, in mid-March, we did 30 deliveries of groceries and medicine and needles for HRT. I just remember feeling so excited. Thirty people got something they needed, from other people who were willing to show up for them.

Within weeks, that number jumped to 100. And I really felt that 100 in my heart. But then 1,000 came, and then 5,000, and—somehow—I felt much less. By the time 10,000 came, I was numb.

When I think about the $1 million we raised and redistributed, the numbers are too big for my mind to fully hold. But when I think about the mom and her kids who put on literal bake sales and stoop sales to raise part of that $1 million, or when I think about the queer brown business owner who did the same thing, or the people going to the grocery store and rolling up to our warehouse operation, showing up again and again, that’s when I’m able to access the expected heart swell of emotion.

I think it’s really important for us to think about how we keep things on a human scale. I see a lot of people saying things like mutual aid is our future, mutual aid is the answer, and I think it’s always productive to ask the follow up question, “what does that mean for you?”  It’s not actually my hope for large-scale crisis response to be the primary solution or mode of service-delivery. In service-oriented work, in trying to survive perpetual crises, we don’t actually get to connect deeply and feel other people’s humanity, on an intelligible scale. I think mutual aid, at its best, can generate part of an answer to the question Ella Baker poses:  “who are your people?”

When you say “numb”, I think about the potential resentment of having to fill a gap that the government left wide open. Is it numbness, or is it a more negative feeling?

When I allow myself to sit with it, I feel so much grief and rage. When I think about what could have happened if the federal government had not taken an utterly callous, softly genocidal approach, my heart breaks. I don’t believe exactly in a framing of mutual aid shouldn’t have to exist. Mutual aid is ancient. But I also believe that what happened in the last year was a violation of the social compact to a degree that should not have been possible. There will be a reckoning that stems from it.

Flash forward to a few months ago, you announced on Twitter that you have a book coming out. When I saw that, I couldn't help but wonder if the book emerged out of your work with Bed-Stuy Strong.

On some levels, the book was an unromantic realization that no one was paying me to run Bed-Stuy Strong. You don’t have this big safety net, you should make some moves. It was the realization that I should pay attention to my intuition, that I first and foremost am a person who cares about using words and stories to think through how we understand the world and ourselves.

The book is a love story, a story of work, of deep friendship, and a queering of the classic bildungsroman (or coming-of-age novel). Or at least it interrogates the book I consider to be the original bildungsroman: Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship. Put in a more attractive way, it centers a young woman who has just finished college and moved to Milwaukee, a city where she knows no one. I’m fundamentally interested in what it means to come of age given that the coming-of-age novel is essentially conservative. It involves young people having a journey of self but ultimately taking their place in an expected and conventional ordered world. I was interested in playing with that, of interrogating becoming. The novel is spiky, observant, interested in class and race and immigration and delusion; angry and funny and hopeful and sad.

In some of your other works, too, I can see you grapple between the human scale and the societal scale.

I am interested in systems, and interested in the art of what’s possible. I am interested, deeply so, in people—and people as sites of wounded but glorious capacity. That’s what unites my art-making and my relational life and my organizing. Everything that works has to work at the human scale. Ideology, organizing, storytelling, however big and abstract—we have to engage these things with our minds. With our finite and solipsistic nature.

I’m curious about how much of your own experience, growing up outside of the United States, in a particularly collectivist-oriented society in Kerala, informs your imagining of what our livelihoods here in the United States could look like?

That’s a beautiful question. Community and collectivism are touchstones for me that hold a lot of beauty and a lot of complexity. You’re absolutely right; it does help me as a writer and organizer and artist to remember that there are ways of being or arranging society that are not defined by the West.  Coming from collectivist-oriented social settings in Kerala and Oman, originally hailing from the first place in the world to democratically elect a communist government that serves working people, of course that has shaped me. However, it’s worth remembering that, across cultures, community is almost always defined by who it excludes and who it centers. To me, solidarity—the understanding that our fates are bound up together—are aspects of a more communal orientation that is worth preserving. They are simple and essential, and very much a necessary antidote to capitalist alienation.

Courtesy of Sarah Thankam Mathews and Bed-Stuy Strong

[Text message reads: Thank you all for your generosity Ms Unis came through for my family with the winter stuff she said the groceries will come on her next day off love you guys and may this kindness go on till eternity]

I have looked at my own heritage for sources of guidance, theories of mutual aid, models of it. The salt marches and home khadi production of the Indian independence movement were savvy political protests with mutual aid organizing baked in. Thousands of people said, we’ll produce this commodity ourselves to stand against the colonizing British forces—an act of economic protests to provide for ourselves. People over yourself; it’s an ethos I was raised with, and very much part of how I move in the world. Other NYC-based organizers, like founder of Bronx Mutual Aid Thahitun Mariam, have spoken about why they and their comrades refuse to be taught socialism by white DSA types; they have a real understanding of these precepts from the motherland, from Bangladesh, which has its own revolutionary history. I appreciated her naming that.

So, where do you see yourself going from here?

I hope to make art for the rest of my life. I’m interested in the idea of literature as a long conversation across time. Before I got into fiction, I was working in progressive policy and advocacy; when I left that world, I made my peace with working in a more long-term time signature. In a way, that decision cedes a lot of control to other people. Canadian poet Dionne Brand, who you mentioned in our email correspondence before this conversation, is pretty important to me. She said once: “Books leave gestures in the body; a certain way of moving, of turning, a certain closing of the eyes, a way of leaving, hesitations. Books leave certain sounds, a certain pacing; mostly they leave the elusive. They leave much more than the words.”

In my life, there is a connection between reading Arundhati Roy and Toni Morrison as a teenager in Oman and what I ended up working on, living, believing. There’s something very moving to me about the thought of getting to be a part of that particular relational mode, which exists in long time, deeply untrackable in direct cause and effect, but shimmering and powerful nonetheless.

---

Liked this piece? Support Bed-Stuy Strong.

You can follow Sarah Thankam Mathews on Twitter here and read some of her work here.