Alora Young| Savants&Syntax

Alora Young is a poet, Actress, and published author with penguin random house. Her book Walking Gentry Home was an amazon best seller!

Alora Young| Savants&Syntax

Alora Young is a poet, Actress, and published author with penguin random house. Her book Walking Gentry Home was an amazon best seller!

Helping Neurodivergent Kids Find Their People

DOPAMINE FARMING

NEUROTYPICALITY IS A CULT

GRITTING, THE HAKA, AND DISPLAYS OF STRENGTH IN THE FACE OF COLONIAL OPRESSION

You could take everything from me, every joy out of my day, every lyric from my mouth, and I would still make music. I would still sing even if I could not move. If the Ace or the pastor calls, I will respond, because the spirit is not something you can take away. More often than not an attitude is attributed where there isn't one so why bother hiding it. If you want to destroy me and all I am composed of of course I'm gonna look at you like you stink, because you do. You reek of insecurity. Colonialism did not disappear. It migrated inward. It moved into the nervous system. It trained bodies to be small, compliant, legible to power. Performance interrupts that training. Performance says we are still here. Performance says we remember who we are. The people of the sun are still dancing. And god damnit we are not going anywhere;

just a theory!

I have an observation that has led to a working hypothesis, though I do not yet have sufficient data to state it with certainty. This is an intuitive framework rather than a researched conclusion, and I am aware of its limits. I suspect that climate plays a significant role in shaping cultural orientations toward individualism, domination, and cooperation, particularly through its relationship to food scarcity, population density, and survival strategies.

remember the djembe drums!

In the before, people danced to honor the soul that powered the most oppressive kind of heat. In the before, we danced to honor spirits alike in stature and temperature. Many long stories later, we still dance. Only now, we dance for the right to dance. We dance for the right to our stories. We dance for the right to our cultures. We dance to stake a claim that the people of the sun are still here. Call and response is extremely common in Black American cultural music. Rhythm is not decoration in Black music. Rhythm is structure. In African and African American traditions, rhythm comes before melody, and melody bends to it. Black people clap on the two and the four because the body understands syncopation as a way of holding time together collectively. White audiences tend to clap on the one and the three because Western music trains listeners to prioritize the downbeat and the dominant line. This difference is not accidental. It is cultural memory. In African traditions, the drum speaks, the body answers, and…

I hope you feel the warmth of the sun today!

On a ninety-five degree day with ninety percent humidity, I stood outside on the blacktop in an impossibly small town in rural western Tennessee. The heat rose off the pavement and made the air appear to vibrate. Heat haze, as they call it here. The kind of heat so dense and so still it looks like movement. The kind of heat that plays tricks on the eye. The kind of heat that makes you see water where there is none. About as far away as you can really get from my cotton fields and cracked asphalt, on an island called Aotearoa, the Indigenous people of New Zealand have a dance built upon a movement of shaking hands. The haka comes from a creation story. It comes from Tāne-rore, the son of Hine-raumati, whose presence on still, hot days is revealed in the quivering appearance of the air. The shimmer itself is the dance. Heat becomes motion. Motion becomes meaning. Between my blacktop and their mountains and tropical forest, there is a distance that should feel endless. And yet, we have far more in common than the…

NORMAL IS A FALLACY!!

Neurodivergence, disability, queerness, and any kind of nonconforming identity were categorized as inherent genetic flaws that should not exist in the population. Normal stopped being descriptive and became a goal, something that was forced upon people.