"I try to swim every damn day I can, and I've learned to scuba dive and snorkel"
About this Quote
Every damn day lands like both a promise and a dare. The voice that hurled Mississippi Goddam at America also stakes out a small, stubborn territory of joy and equilibrium. Swimming becomes a ritual of sovereignty, a practice that answers the grind of touring, the bruises of racism, and the cost of being a truth-teller with a daily return to breath, muscle, and rhythm. Water is not a stage; it asks no encores. It keeps time with the body alone.
Her years abroad, from West Africa to Europe, often brought her close to the sea, and the sea offered what the spotlight could not: anonymity, silence, and a weightless freedom. To say swim every damn day is to claim discipline without drudgery, the same ferocious focus she brought to the piano transposed to a different instrument: the nervous system. Stroke after stroke, the mind meets a steady metronome, and the world’s noise thins to the sound of breath.
Learning to scuba dive and snorkel widens that freedom into curiosity. It is not enough to float; there is a need to go under, to descend below the surface glare and look at what lives in the depths. That impulse echoes her art, which rarely skimmed the top. She sought the underside of American life and human feeling, and she paid for it. Underwater, descent requires calm, control, and equalization, the same composure a singer commands to hold a long line. The body becomes the instrument; breath is tempo; vision clarifies as the water stills.
There is also a quiet politics here. For a Black woman whose country once barred access to pools and beaches, daily immersion is a reclamation. Leisure becomes resistance, pleasure a form of repair. The sentence reads like a self-prescription: move, breathe, sink below the chatter, and surface renewed. It is both a survival tactic and an ethic of delight, fiercely ordinary and radically free.
Her years abroad, from West Africa to Europe, often brought her close to the sea, and the sea offered what the spotlight could not: anonymity, silence, and a weightless freedom. To say swim every damn day is to claim discipline without drudgery, the same ferocious focus she brought to the piano transposed to a different instrument: the nervous system. Stroke after stroke, the mind meets a steady metronome, and the world’s noise thins to the sound of breath.
Learning to scuba dive and snorkel widens that freedom into curiosity. It is not enough to float; there is a need to go under, to descend below the surface glare and look at what lives in the depths. That impulse echoes her art, which rarely skimmed the top. She sought the underside of American life and human feeling, and she paid for it. Underwater, descent requires calm, control, and equalization, the same composure a singer commands to hold a long line. The body becomes the instrument; breath is tempo; vision clarifies as the water stills.
There is also a quiet politics here. For a Black woman whose country once barred access to pools and beaches, daily immersion is a reclamation. Leisure becomes resistance, pleasure a form of repair. The sentence reads like a self-prescription: move, breathe, sink below the chatter, and surface renewed. It is both a survival tactic and an ethic of delight, fiercely ordinary and radically free.
Quote Details
| Topic | Ocean & Sea |
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