"Hey Mama?" by Zoe Donovan (she/her)

I wrote this song for a class last semester in which I studied the works of several plays that centered Black and queer stories. For our final project, we had to create something that related to the theme “Every back in the day has a queer right now” and my final product kind of comes from two veins of inspiration. In the beginning of the semester, we were trying to unpack the title of this play called “Fierce Love” by Pomo Afro Homos, and our professor had us define the words “love” and “fierce” separately and then define them together. In an attempt to define the words together, one of my friends offered the phrase “Love despite the unloving,” and I’ve thought about that phrase ever since. The other vein of inspiration simply comes from this unprecedented time that I think is making a lot of us reconsider what all types of love look like when we can’t be with each other in person. In my opinion, everyone being forced into isolation both reveals and conceals certain truths about love. It is SO hard not to be able to hold, hug, kiss, or high five your friends, family, and loved ones and obviously the inability to hold space with each other conceals part of the nature of some of our relationships. But at the same time, COVID-19 has revealed to me that love is also consistent effort, silly group chat names, honesty, FaceTiming for hours, patience, bonding over dumb TikToks, trust, and binging Avatar: The Last Airbender on Netflix all by myself (because I love myself, goddammit!).

In the end, the song came out sounding like a young child asking their parents to explain love to them, and at the end they ask “does love live despite the unloving?” I had enough questions about love pre COVID-19, but this time has given rise to even more questions and a handful of really important lessons. One thing is clear to me, however, and that is that the love within communities like :a new spelling of my name will absolutely withstand the unloving that is racism, anti-blackness, transphobia, homophobia, ableism, COVID-19, and all of the other diseases that plague this country and this world.