By bri robinson

As I trace the lips of Lake Erie with a tender caress and supple tongue, I squint and lean into the city of Cleveland and am met with a smooch that stings. To some, her pucker offers a buoyancy soft enough to slip into. For others, this is an indication of how sour she can be. To me, this kiss is complex; saccharine and tart, like a plum. Her kiss is a delicacy— the flavor not for everyone—but it’s still charming enough for me to kiss and tell. 

Cosmically intentional or not, the region’s pride for itself is fragrant and intoxicating. Cleveland, OH, born July 22, 1796, is a Leo, an astrological sign said to be passionate, loyal, vivacious, and fearless. The potency of the city embodies the lion, certainly leaving an impression on all who pass through. Like a good kisser that keeps you coming back for more and pulls you in with a warm embrace, Cleveland’s kiss asks you to lean in to fully receive it. 

A ripe plum, sweetened by the same earth its flesh will one day return to, will fall and briefly depart from its life-giving roots. My journey with Cleveland has been the same. Despite its flaws, I see the city’s beauty, and I shall sweeten it as it’s sweetened me. How delightful is it when your lips return to the sweetness of a stone fruit, even if you’ve bitten too deeply, surprised by its pit? Much like the kiss that Cleveland offers, full of contradictions and complexities, I find myself drawn to the city's shores—just as Toni Morrison, another lover of Lake Erie, was. Morrison, who also recognized the unique power of this place, was devoted. She claimed it as central to her creative process, saying in an interview following her Nobel prize for literature, “I stood at the border, stood at the edge and claimed it as central. l claimed it as central, and let the rest of the world move over to where I was.” Her connection to this region, like mine, was not just a matter of geography but of identity, lineage, and a deep understanding of what it means to belong to a place that is both bitter and sweet. The same fruit trees planted by our ancestors that provided them nourishment are the same ones I bring to my lips, tasting the history and generational legacy held within their pulpy flesh.  

Sometimes I wonder if I’m pulled back home because of this kiss’s familiarity. Home is where the heart is. Where lips meet, they also part. Their connection never ends, rather there are brief intermissions, opening, closing and expanding.

While Mother Morrison stood at the cusp of Lake Erie and claimed it as central, venerating it within her award-winning literary works, the digital realm often tells a different story. In the fast-moving world of social media, Ohio is often reduced to a punchline—an “error” in the collective consciousness of Gen Alpha. This contrast highlights the tension between the history we honor and the narratives that dominate in our current digital age. In the digital stratosphere, the mere mention of Ohio is one of detriment, at least in the middle school lexicon. To the youth,  the word Ohio is used colloquially as an adjective coded to emphasize the uncool — that nothing goes right in the state, or that the place is devoid of value in the first place, diminishing the historical flourishes and potential in this marvelous pocket of the Midwest, only recognizing the state as a site of constant mishap.  

Between the Great Migration and today, events like the foundation of Karamu House in 1915, the Hough Riots of 1966, Carl Stokes’ 1967 election, and Tamir Rice’s unjust murder in 2014 have situated Cleveland’s Black community as resilient, beget from a complicated history  reflecting wider patterns of migration, economic shifts, and racial tensions.

It's imperative to know the history you emerge from. Just as Cleveland's Black community has navigated and reshaped the city's complex cultural landscape, WITH(IN).DIGITAL seeks to do so in the digital landscape. As I think of our function as a portal of Black midwestern thought, I recall this quote from Glitch Feminism: “Glitch is a correction to the machine, and with it we take up arms to declare that an error does not exist in the code of living.” Through our work, we echo Legacy Russell's assertion that a glitch—an error—is not a flaw but a correction. We are here to correct the narrative, to reclaim Ohio not as an “error,” but as a vibrant, vital part of the Midwest’s story.  

When we transform this sacred space from the digital into the physical, we corrode the misrepresentations of Ohio as an error. Russell continues, 

“Errors, ever unpredictable, surface the unnamable, point toward a wild unknown. To become an error is to surrender to becoming unknown, unrecognizable, unnamed. New names are created to describe errors, capturing them and pinning down their edges for examination. All this is done in an attempt to keep things up and running; this is the conceit of language, where people assume if they can find a word to describe something, that this is the beginning of controlling it.”

As we work to re-code these digital narratives, we embrace the idea that to emerge is to come forth and manifest oneself at any time, unpredictable. The Midwest, often overlooked or misrepresented, is poised for a resurgence. Through E-Merge, we re-code the language of history, despite their prior programming. Recently, I’ve been noting tirelessly in conversation, Instagram stories, and even in my dreams, “The Midwest shall rise again.” Our re-emergence is inevitable, and it's a blessing to be one arm pulling up the region through the marriage of the historical to the technological. As we E-Merge from our keyboards and screens into the physical realm, I cannot help but ruminate on what this practice of bringing the Midwest to the people may coalesce—a kiss that lingers, asking us to lean in, to taste the sweet and the bitter, and recognize the kinetic possibility that lies within.

This essay was first published in the zine E-Merge: Artistic Intersections of the Black Midwest, created for WITH(IN).DIGITAL’s inaugural in-person event that occurred October 2024 in Cleveland, Ohio. Learn more about E-Merge here.