Selection from Etude IV: House on Fire

I have spent the last few years dreading the onslaught of the sunnier months, have felt it like a slow inrush of tidal desperation. I have felt the contrast between the ugliness I carried inside me, and the jolliness that sprung into life every which way I looked. I have felt the maddening pressure of having to dress more lightly, and reveal more of this body I have wrestled with all my life. I have felt the barrage of noise and hustle and gregariousness ac cost me when all I wanted was silence, merciful silence. I have felt cornered in the aggressive whirlwind of engagements and social obligations and endless celebrations that occur under the slowblinking eye of the sweltering heat, and felt stunned into inertia: because it stupefies you, that heat, in a way even the cold does not. It presses down upon you, that seemingly tender caress, makes you wilt and perspire in your misery.

Back Cover Alt Text

And to the twelve-year-old

who is ruminating on all these

messages that will lead her astray more

than once, I say: Little girl, you are right.

There is more to this spleen of yours [...], and

you are closer than you think. It’s just going to

take you the long way around to figure this out.

Thiam’s “To Bring You My Love” is complex, a cross-genre lyric hybrid which knows intimately the shapeshifting realities of Mad life. Yet its tone is profoundly clear: there is a place beyond sanity, and even beyond whitewashed ideas of “self-love” as recovery’s simple key. Instead, Thiam offers not solutions to Madness but existing pathways quietly tread and lives, however ambivalently, fed. “To Bring You My Love” is not an easy text, not a mainstream or palatable story of disordered embodiment since cured. And it rings among the truest of any I’ve read.

- [sarah] Cavar, author of Failure to Comply.

You know how some years ask questions? Well, Aïcha Martine Thiam's book, To Bring You My Love, goes through the asking and answering process, allowing space to breathe. The wordplay paired with the art makes for a deep dive into the speaker, and readers are granted a glimpse into how to view the speaker's world. Thiam brings us a relatable narrator who discovers themselves through reflection and is not scared to put themselves in the line of criticism while having no shame in critiquing the society around them. There is much to commend here.

Ashley Elizabeth, author

A Family Thing and black has every right to be angry