What is the Haunting Fantastic?

Mantra:
The past doesn’t pass. It flickers, unsettles, and opens new ways of sensing what still matters.

Centering Thought:
The fantastic is not fantasy. It is not about escaping reality, but about sensing where reality fractures. It’s a crack in the familiar. A tremor in the structures we’re told are fixed. It’s what happens when the world, for just a moment, reveals it is not as stable or singular as we’ve been taught. The fantastic is an experience, a mood, a signal—often felt before it is understood. It’s the feeling that something’s off, but also alive. It’s when the world we’ve been given stutters and something else—a question, a possibility, a disruption—steps in.

Political theorist Richard Iton gave me this language. In his classic book, In Search of the Black Fantastic, he shows how Black artists, especially in the wake of the civil rights era, never stopped imagining life beyond the domain of formal politics. Even as formal institutions opened their doors, Black cultural workers kept creating, kept experimenting, kept making room for something deeper than inclusion: a shift in how life could be sensed, shared, shaped. Iton called that shift the fantastic—and for him, it wasn’t decorative or dreamy. It was haunting. It was serious. It mattered.

That haunting has followed me, too. I did not grow up with the clean arcs of progress or safety. My childhood was shaped by undecidability—tenderness one moment, confusion the next. Love and harm didn’t take turns. They arrived together, and often stayed too long. There were good days. There were strange silences. There were prayers I wasn’t sure how to hold. That complexity didn’t disappear once I stepped into higher education. It followed me—in my body, in my memory, in the parts of myself I often have to tuck away in professional spaces that prefer a polished testimony.

I was loved, nurtured, and raised in contrast. In coiled tension. In the flickering knowledge that beauty and fear often occupy the same room. And I carry that with me now, not as a burden, but as a kind of attunement.

The haunting fantastic is the name I give to this attunement. It’s how I make sense of the past that didn’t end when I left it behind. It’s how I recognize that some disruptions don’t destroy us—they show us new ways to feel, to remember, to move. The fantastic doesn’t give closure. It gives texture. It opens space where something unexpected—something vital—can begin to breathe.

And now, I ask you:

Where in your life have you felt that something didn’t quite line up—the moment didn’t follow the script, the world broke form just enough for you to see through it? What past event still lingers, not as a clear lesson but as a strange, unresolved presence? Where have you encountered longing, faith, or calling in places the world told you were unworthy of such things? What have you felt in your body that you couldn’t name, but couldn’t shake?

I ask not to diagnose you, but to invite you. The fantastic—especially the haunting fantastic—is not always loud. Sometimes it hums. Sometimes it waits. Sometimes it asks you to turn toward what you’ve tried to forget, to touch the memory that still glows beneath the surface.

This is your invitation: not to fix what flickers, but to feel it. Not to resolve the past, but to let it speak. Let the cracks in your story be the places you return to, not to escape the world—but to reimagine how to live within it.

Affirmation:
I do not fear what lingers. I make space for what unfolds. I welcome the questions I carry. I let the past speak—and I listen, not for perfection, but for life.