By Afifa Aza. Photos by SO((U))L HQ

Love gives naught but itself and takes naught from itself.
Love possesses not nor would it be possessed;
For Love is sufficient unto love….
When you love you should not say, “God is in my heart”, but rather, “I am in the heart of God.”
And think not you can direct the course of love, for love, if it finds you worthy, directs your course.
Love has no other desire but to fulfill itself.
But if you love and most needs have desires, let these be your desires…”
-Khalil Gibran

One of the most painful times in my life was when the relationship with my partner from high school ended. It was miserable. I lost weight. There is nothing I could have done to make them stay. I experienced a period of disillusioned experiments. My desire was to rekindle some kind of love wherever there was attraction. For the most part it went badly. A number of sexual encounters, probably the most adventurous of my 20 something years. Thinking about this makes me think about my parents. Their story of love intrigues me.

My parents have been husband and wife living in the same house before I knew myself. I am so horrible with details so I couldn’t tell you how many years that is.

My father is a man of little excitement and simple routine. He left for work by 7:00 and was home by 5:00. Monday to Friday. On Saturdays we went to church and Sundays he would sleep, read the Gleaner and eat Sunday dinner. This is what I remember most about my father, that he would always come home. He would open the door and say “Good evening” and if mummy was at the table she would say “Good evening” back. We were supposed to say “Good evening” too.

My grandmother would say a loud “Evening Missa Harris”. Shortly after he came out of his work clothes he would go to the back room to iron his clothes for the next workday. By the time he was finished he would have a shower and then it would be 7:00pm time for the nightly news. It was predictable; it made me feel safe. I felt like he would always protect us because he was always there. He loved us in an unexciting routine way. My father is a strange man. He isn’t romantic (at least not to my knowledge) and seeing him and my mother together makes you wonder how she keeps loving him or why she stays with him. It makes me think that she must really love him.

I remember telling my sister once that the reason I was in love with my second partner was because they reminded me of daddy. I respected the way he loved.

I have had several intense experiences with love. I think perhaps one of the things I fear the most about being in love is the day my partner says, “This isn’t working out”. So I try my best to be a good partner, hoping it will always be worth it and it will always work out.

Recently I came to understand that people were not the only things you could fall in love with. About three years ago I had started to pursue a dream of mine called the SO((U))L HQ. It started with two ideas. One, the idea that ‘the product is the place’ and second, a deep desire to recreate the feeling of a place in Jamaica that was as stimulating friendly and fun as the artistic/creative scene I had experienced in London when I’d visited several years before.

I imagined the SO((U))L HQ as a place that I wanted to ‘be’ in, and where I wanted people to ‘be’ with me. It was Georgia who first came up with the name ‘Sounds of Life’ (my original dj’ing gig), and I decided to call it SO((U))L. The HQ was the place that Georgia and I worked together building ideas for and about our community. The HQ was the place where I felt passion, purpose, honesty and fatigue. I was in love with that place, well the thing, the idea, and the work. I loved that place with all the love I had, and I opened it up to others with love.

It wasn’t really until two months ago when Georgia and I were struggling to pay rent for the HQ and I was preparing to have a much-dreaded conversation with my landlord about having to give up the HQ that I realized how much I loved it. The thought of losing the HQ, the pains I felt in my chest and in my head made me realize that I was deeply in love with the HQ.

That was the moment that I forced myself out of bed and went online to create a crowdfunding campaign to keep the HQ and our other space (Di Institute for Social Leadership-ISL) open. I realized then that my love for these spaces meant I would do anything to keep them alive. I think of these spaces as my life’s work and I realize now that you have to love your work. Not just ‘love as work’ but ‘love as more.’ You have to love what it is you believe in. Was Audre Lorde in love? Was Walter Rodney in love? Was Marcus Garvey in love?

I am 33 years old. When you are 33 and believe in Audre Lorde and Walter Rodney and Marcus Garvey (and their love), and have enough education to understand ‘Globalization,’ ‘Dependency Theory,’ ‘How Europe Underdeveloped Africa,’ ‘World Systems Theory’; you often ask about the past, the time before you were born when these people who thought these things, and believed these things about the world and really wanted to make it different – lived. I find myself often puzzled by their absence in the present. I always look to them to help me put the pieces together, to figure out the here and now. There are maybe two questions I always find myself wanting to ask: ‘Why?’ and ‘What happened?’ I would want to ask them if they had ever given up on love. Did they ever stop loving their work?

I believe that ‘to love’ is to never give up on love….never give up on people, never give up on all the things that can make life beautiful even when times change.

I am writing this as I am about to lose something I love. I have lost many things that I have loved. I still can’t find the ring I bought from the Zimbabwean artist at Camden Market in London. What I am about to lose, my space, is something very important to me. Last week I asked my friends on Facebook if we knew how many times Marcus Garvey might have cried? I am losing something that I love but I am not giving up on love.