Busy Being Black with Joshua Rivers

Dr Ajamu X explores taking responsibility for what we create, and the punk-radical necessity of tending to archives that reflect and honour the complex and pleasureful lives of queer Black folk—now and in the so-called past.

Regular Listeners have access to the full and ad-free conversation on Busy Being Black's Patreon.

This conversation was recorded at the 2025 Kinfolk Convening in Manchester.

'I think we have a reluctance to talk about pleasure for pleasure's sake; to validate it, we feel we have to attach it to something else like politics or sexuality. Sometimes it's just the thing itself. There is a reluctance to talk about what makes us feel good—what we want done with our Black bodies, with our lovers or with our friends—[because] we live in a pleasure-phobic society.'

⁠Dr Ajamu X⁠ is a darkroom and fine art photographic artist, whose practice, aesthetics and theoretical provocations privilege sensuality, and the tactile, material elements of the photographic act. Ajamu's work is held in numerous private and public collections, including the Autograph ABP, Tate Britain, the Victoria & Albert Museum and the National Portrait Gallery.

Busy Being Black's theme music was created for the show by Lazarus Lynch and Joshua Pleeter. The oceanic cellos that open the show were created for Busy Being Black by Dylan Halverson.

Cover photo of Ajamu © 2024 Henry Mills

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There is perhaps no better person to speak to about Black creative expression and excellence through art than Kadiatu Kanneh-Mason—the matriarch, mother and woman who makes possible the prodigious creativity of the seven Kanneh-Mason siblings.  

In her book, To Be Young, Gifted and Black, Kadiatu shows that the key to a creatively fulfilling and purposeful life is in how we live in between the highs and the lows—the relationships we nurture, the humour we entertain and in the routines we build that honour and sustain our passions. 

Part II of my conversation with Kadiatu continues on Patreon for Regular Listeners: patreon.com/busybeingblack

This conversation was recorded at Manngington Book Bash 2025, one of the UK's most cherished literary festivals.  If the interiority & craft of authors, writers & artists stir your imagination to whirling, come to Mannington Book Bash 2026.

Thank you to Henry Layte and the team at the Book Hive.

Busy Being Black's theme music was created for the show by Lazarus Lynch and Joshua Pleeter. The oceanic cellos that open the show were created for Busy Being Black by Dylan Halverson.

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I sat down with award-winning author Brandon Taylor live at Brixton House Theatre to mark the UK launch of his latest novel, Minor Black Figures. Our conversation explores what happens when Black artists resist the demands of the always-on attention economy to instead embrace the archives, tend to our cultural inheritances and allow ourselves—and the characters in our art—the messy complexities we are so often encouraged to hide.

06:20 How's your heart?

18:00 Real Life in a Black Square Summer

36:00 Minor Black Figures in Interminable Pandemics

43:00 It's okay to be an uppity negro

Get your copy of Minor Black Figures from your local bookshop.

This episode includes the voices of: Lorraine Hansberry and Pamela Sneed.

 If the interiority & craft of authors, writers & artists stir your imagination to whirling, come to Mannington Book Bash.

Busy Being Black is only sustainable with community support. Become a Regular Listener on Patreon ✷ patreon.com/busybeingblack

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As we bear witness to the destruction of our world and kin through handheld technologies designed as slot machines, and increasingly disoriented by the hourly oscillations between the cannibal horror and unutterable awe of being human in 2026, Minna Salami reminds us that we won’t build new worlds with the same words that built this one. Read that again, friends.

With her full-bodied philosophy, sensuous knowledge, she calls us back to the wild, sensate, subterranean and queer within and beyond us so that we can reclaim what europatriarchal knowledge systems taught us was uncivilised and savage—including the innumerable ways of knowing that have nothing to do with taxonomies or science or murder.

Minna says that ‘freedom is the ability to conjure and then create of our lives the sense of rapture and joy that is our birthright.’ And we know very well that europatriarchal knowledge systems quite explicitly do not offer that as an option

About Minna Salami ✷ Minna is an acclaimed afrofeminist scholar, author and cultural critic. Her publication, Kaleido, explores society, culture and power through the kaleidoscopic method: a sensuous, multilayered and epistemically polyamorous approach to knowledge that draws from multiple intersections and cultures.

Busy Being Black is the award-winning podcast for Black LGBTQ+ creative, cultural & spiritual inquiry.

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PERKS + PARTNERS

advaya creates courses to awaken the human spirit & inspire purposeful action in the world. Otherworlds begins on 12 May and provides the perspectives, practices & community we need to become active & empowered agents for emerging futures: https://advaya.life/otherworlds

🔑 BUSY-OTHERWORLDS for 15% off advaya+ membership

Founded in 1969, Pluto Press is one of the world’s oldest radical publishers & their focus remains making interventions in contemporary struggles: https://www.plutobooks.com/?s=imagination&post_type=product

🔑 BUSY50 for 50% off

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My bodacious conversation with theatre-maker and cosmological enchantress Candice D'Meza opens with my poem, Our Life Together. Inspired by an exchange between Nikki Giovanni and James Baldwin, the poem is a fitting expression of the ways Black artists think, feel and create across time and space to build the worlds we need now.

Candice D'Meza builds liberated worlds through art, cosmology and the Imagination Institute, where she teaches others to reclaim the operational divinity & living power of the Black radical imagination: https://www.candicedmeza.com/

Busy Being Black is the award-winning podcast for Black LGBTQ+ creative, cultural & spiritual inquiry ✷ https://www.busybeingblack.com/

If the podcast moves you, please:

Support ✷ https://buy.stripe.com/aFa3cw82KfqeeNE0UdgjC00

Subscribe ✷ http://www.youtube.com/@busybeingblacktube

Follow ✷ https://www.instagram.com/_busybeingblack

PERKS + PARTNERS

advaya creates courses to awaken the human spirit & inspire purposeful action in the world. Otherworlds begins on 12 May and provides the perspectives, practices & community we need to become active & empowered agents for emerging futures: https://advaya.life/otherworlds

🔑 BUSY-OTHERWORLDS for 15% off advaya+ membership

Founded in 1969, Pluto Press is one of the world’s oldest radical publishers & their focus remains making interventions in contemporary struggles: https://www.plutobooks.com/?s=imagination&post_type=product

🔑 BUSY50 for 50% off

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Poet and author Dean Atta returns to Busy Being Black to share how therapy, memoir-writing and entering into his "big man stage" have transformed his relationship with his mental health, creativity and self-acceptance. The episode opens with a joint reading of Dean's poem "Two Black Boys in Paradise"—the poem that inspired the BAFTA-winning animation of the same name—and closes with Dean reading "On Days When" from his poetry collection There Is Still Love Here.

Busy Being Black is the award-winning podcast for queer Black creative, cultural and spiritual vitality. If the show moves you, consider ⁠buying me a coffee or a book⁠.

Dean Atta is an award-winning Black British writer from London known for his heartfelt storytelling rooted in his Greek Cypriot and Jamaican heritage. He writes poetry, fiction and nonfiction for all ages.

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Busy Being Black returns on Tuesday 24 March 2026 with a new conversation between me Dean Atta, who recently won a BAFTA for Two Black Boys in Paradise. Today, in honour of World Poetry Day, I’m resurfacing our 2018 conversation in which we explore recovery and intimacy, desire and vulnerability and the role of poetry in bringing us closer to ourselves, to each other and to people who are no longer with us.

This episode includes two poems by Dean: Black Flamingo and How to Love Yourself.

Support the show.

About Dean ✷ Dean Atta is an award-winning Black British writer from London known for his heartfelt storytelling rooted in his Greek Cypriot and Jamaican heritage. He writes poetry, fiction and nonfiction for all ages.

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Art is a vital mechanism through which we process grief and sustain life. In times of intense discord, denying our impulse to create often results in destructive behaviours. Artist and writer Rosel Jackson Stern offers a gentle provocation to anyone feeling paralysed by the current geopolitical climate: find and nurture even the tiniest moments of joy.

By anchoring life in joy, Rosel has built an artistic and spiritual practice that moves them closer—with every prayer, sweep of the brush and stroke of the pen—to a world where queer Black people experience an abundance of peace, community and creative vitality. It is in and through our joy we find our freedom, and this episode is a reminder that liberation is rooted in the timeless intimacy of the present moment.

Watch this conversation.

About Rosel ✷ Rosel Jackson Stern (they/them) is an artist, journalist and writer whose creativity spans several mediums and modalities. The purpose of their work is to carve out space for the unknown, and is a testament to what happens when we take leaps of faith.

Busy Being Black is the award-winning podcast for Black LGBTQ+ creative, cultural & spiritual inquiry.

If the podcast moves you, buy me a book.

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Today marks eight years since Busy Being Black first came to life: on 21 October 2017, I produced and hosted an event called Forbidden Fruits, anchored by a conversation about love, intimacy and belonging among queer Black men. I couldn't have known in that moment how much I would need this space.

Ben Ellis is a poet—and a poet in the way James Baldwin, Toni Morrison and René Ménil meant it: one ordained to dive into the unconscious and awaken the rest of us with their marvels. I am stunned and struck by the energy of Ben's poetry, his vulnerability, his rage. I am enlivened by his sensitivity, his heartache and his desire for peace of mind. I am grateful to honour my own thresholds by bearing witness at the gates of his.

If you enjoyed this conversation, you'll enjoy the ⁠Black Marvellous⁠: a growing collection of conversations that adventure into Black imaginative vigour—in art, attitude and life.

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Chapters

00:26 Are you avoiding your own emergence?

02:04 The ordination of the bard: 8 years of Busy Being Black

12:43 Ben recites Pansies

16:32 All my poems are sad n*gga poems

24:19 There is no word for depression in my native tongue

29:25 Who is served by the performance of our grief?

33:16 Ben recites Milkshake

37:09 Can we reclaim any spirituality from within the religions that have harmed us?

47:23 I am Black first and Black also

51:00 Ben recites To Orlando

53:37 Peace of mind

55:55 Every gesture is a prayer when you know who you are

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Thank you:

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A tender meditation on grief, healing and courage with multidisciplinary artist Phoebe Boswell, who creates portals that return us to our miraculous hearts.

If you'd like to see the art we discuss in this conversation, you can watch this episode on @busybeingblacktube.

The ⁠⁠Black Marvellous⁠⁠: a growing collection of conversations that adventure into Black imaginative vigour—in art, attitude & life.

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If this conversation resonates with you, there are three ways you can show your love: leave a comment, rating, or review; share this conversation on social media; or buy me a book.

The song 'Busy Being Black' was created for the show and in collaboration with Lazarus Lynch and Joshua Pleeter.

The song 'Baptism' was created for the show and in collaboration with Dylan Halverson—and inspired by the oceanic overwhelm I felt engaging with Phoebe Boswell's art & the music she commissioned from bassist Gregg August: 'The promise of your redemption is within the depths you've been avoiding.'

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