Resistance in Fermentation
Photo by Azim Malek
Every day anger builds in the pit of my stomach, like kindling to a fire. I feel an urgent need to do something, to grab the hands of those I love, those that look like me, and pull them to safety. But right now there is little I can do. I cannot keep people from dying or secure a dignified existence for Black and Indigenous Queer people of color on my own, or restructure the mechanics of state and capital. So instead, I make bread.
The act of fermentation can be read as an exercise in power — a metabolic process that cannot be sped, slowed, or controlled. This process will yield only within a relationship that transforms both person and dough. The starter is ready to use when it can float in warm water. I know to stop mixing when I can see the light through a ball of dough stretched thin between my fingertips. I can feel the presence of life in my dough when it fizzles like soda as I carefully lift and turn every thirty minutes for three hours. The life of my starter has just begun. I brought it into this world and, for now, it is my responsibility. If given the right resources a starter can live forever, embedding itself into families that promise to care for it as they care for each other.
So every morning with the sun, I rise and feed my starter culture. It lives in a jar on my counter. As long as I provide my culture with the nutrients it needs (equal parts flour and water), it will provide me with the nutrients I need. If my starter is neglected it might start to revolt, producing a layer of alcohol or toxicity as it awaits the care it was promised. As one link in a chain of BIQTPOC people that have been systematically denied the care we were promised, the care that we deserve, I can sense the toxicity beginning to bubble over. It is an anger inherited from those that have passed. From those forced to live in the margins of society. Right now, there may be little I can do. But like my starter I have been given the gift of time, the luxury of rest, the ability to mourn, and the space in which to imagine other ways of being. So I let the energy of my anger propel my intentions. I feed off it. By the time we are allowed back outside, it will be overflowing, bubbling with potential, ready to be shaped into something new.