Proximity: A Portfolio of Writing and Art by Women of Color

Shuchi Saraswat: The shape of the world changes when you think about it proximally . . . For the portfolio, we were always interested in putting together writers and artists who were thinking about systemic structures, which is to say, politically. Introducing a relational term allowed for a wider range of approaches. It’s a kind of geometrical word too, isn’t it? The writer one vertex, her subject(s) the others, those lines the space between: proximity.

Ru Freeman: As women of color, I imagine we carry this shape within us no matter where we are, a sort of stela fragment, incised with hieroglyphs of our own making, that decodes surroundings, relationships, and all manner of structures: sociopolitical, emotional, cultural, linguistic, religious, and so on. Which makes what we create profoundly personal and resolutely contextual to the wider sisterhood of artists.

Preti Taneja: This feeling of connection, of global solidarities made visible, of writers standing next to, even if at a geographical distance from, each other is what I think we’ve sought to show. . . . All of the artists we’ve chosen innately express that sense of shared struggle in their work. I find in their honesty, their refusal to look away, their determination to excavate what separates people and expose it to the readers’ gaze, a heart-lifting resistance and refusal to despair.

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