A couple of installments back, I shared a photo of a print I made: birds in black and white in front of a green background, with lines, maybe rays, radiating from them. Sharing my prints publicly was a 2023 goal of mine, a way to claim this practice as a part of myself before others and battle my persistent perfectionism. I'm excited that soon a set of my prints responding to Mariame Kaba's We Do This 'Til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice will circulate in the most public way for me yet. They will feature on Reading Work, a collective art piece and daily practice focused on abolition and reparations that launched at the beginning of this year. 

Of course, this sharing doesn't mean my perfectionism has been vanquished. I look at those hornbills and see the effects of over-inking the soft plastic block from which I carved away strips to reveal the birds, details now blacked out. I note the conspiracy of my amateurism and the relative quality of my materials in the speckled green background. I catch the misalignment of the multiple prints that allow for a three-color image in unintended white borders. Persistence, I tell you.

Despite these flaws, I also see something I'm rather proud of. I spent much of my childhood convinced I wasn't particularly creative in an artistic sense, and I have carved away at this self-limitation now for some years, weird little installation after odd collage, brief course after YouTube tutorial. When I started printmaking in the early pandemic, I did so inspired by former roommates who messed around with the art form. I found that it fit me in ways I still can't quite put my finger on. At least one I could. I was constantly making mistakes. I would forget that I needed to carve the mirror image of what I would eventually want to print. I would slice through the buttery rubber on parts of an image I hoped would hold ink (no longer). I would neglect to get the corners of an image fully transferred to the paper. But between the opportunity to print many editions and the way I saw some mistakes turn into effects I quite liked, I didn't care so much about them. The flaws became an accepted part of the process, even a generative one.

It helped that I had also gotten better at doing things for the sake of pure enjoyment. I liked linocut, that was enough, that was it. It was a gift to myself, and one I increasingly gave to others—a windswept tree sent through the mail, gingko leaves fallen onto a cloth bag, an ode to the magic of bread baking on a tea towel. I loved sharing what I made this way, and with it came affirmation that grew my confidence to share more widely. I heard more and more: "you could sell these," "I would buy this," "you can't give me this for free." My prints had value—that I already knew—but they also now had monetary worth.

There were many times last year when my best laid plans for aligning writing and consulting projects went awry, as they are wont to do. I'd finish a chapter early, and a project wasn't set to start for another few weeks—that kind of thing. So I would start to scheme: how best to use that time, what new project to launch within it, how to fill a money gap brought on by some contract falling through. "You could sell these," "I would buy this," "you can't give me this for free." These kindnesses loomed, and I started to conceive of my prints as a way to make some cash. I pitched a friend with a framing business on a collaboration, and I stocked up on paper during a trip to the US to insure I could churn out sufficient inventory. And then I stopped. I stopped printing. I no longer had the desire.

Much has been written about the societal nudges that tell us to turn our hobbies into jobs and constantly monetize our time. Kenya is particularly awash in it; side hustles are so common and so valorized that the current president rode to victory on the shoulders of those he calls Hustler Nation. I'd bought in, and it ruined a practice I'd come to love. Fortunately, I didn't need that side hustle. I could leave it behind. To be clear, I see no shame in being a working artist who sells their work. For me, this wasn't about purity; it was about under what conditions I felt like playing.

I soon started printing again, spurred on by the desire to make a gift for a friend. This was the frame that melded with my own artistic impulses to actually spark creation: my prints as gifts, literal or metaphorical. I have ended up selling some via Cheche Books in Nairobi: prints for a free Palestine with proceeds going to the Palestine Children's Relief Fund. These contributions are small, like the mistakes they join to add more texture and unforeseen meaning to my little hobby. They, all of them, are gifts.