Mbombo Dream Echoes

As part of a video game conceptualized by artist Sondi and commissioned by The Couch, I was brought on board as narrative designer to tell the story of a world of radical Black rest. Mbombo builds on years of research into the nature of rest and dreaming as radical forms of resistance against capital, colonial violence on the Black body. Set in an unfolding, vibrant dreamscape the game raises profound questions about the potentiality of the dreamscape as a collective refuge.

What’s possible when we rest? What do our dreams unravel?

They were headed to work in Khartoum, Kinshasa and Lille or they were on their feet cooking for families in Berlin, Brussels and Tulsa. Perhaps they were protesting in Brooklyn, Paramaribo, and Los Angeles, or they were praying in Gaza, Damascus and Port-au-Prince; almost certainly they were heavy with a load beyond their lifespans in Bahia, Kingston and Mogadishu.

Working, fighting. This they had been at for centuries. Wherever they landed they demanded peace and pay; their voices beaten back by regimes that sought to reconstitute their blackness as mere fuel for the engine of industry.

Their bodies could no longer hold.

An exhaustion spread from the river to the sea… In the mountains and the cities, rural Black people, coastal Black people, farming Black people, millions everywhere all at once took back a breath so deep as to contain the plundered peace of all ancestors.

Wherever they stood it came, suddenly and simultaneously: refusal, refusal, refusal. And in a gust they collapsed into sleep.