Tarot Image Descriptions
The Student
Image description: A black and white digital ink painting depicting a person walking, bent over carrying bags and a large book with six people stacked on top of their back: one sits in front of a laptop, two with books, one is sleeping, another uses an abacus whose beads are spilling out, and the person at the top stands in front of many arms reaching to the sky and a graduation cap tossed in the air.
The Student is the twenty-ninth card in the major arcana, sometimes known as the lost card. The Student cried the day of graduation. They play one role for the Mother, another for schools, another as the Daughter, another for workforces, another as the Model Minority, another for the state, always in the pull of the annihilating void. The Student is, at essence, a note-taker: be grateful / always be ok / chase the promise of / this, for hours / never complain never be sick keep going / nothing is ever enough the work goes impossibly on / is college life normal stress? / what would it mean to leave / we are finishing our parents’ immigration stories / leaving behind the fact of living / we are not grades / a condition of what can’t / don’t feel guilty. Drawing the Student card in a reading reminds you that Student debt extends forward and backward across our collective lifetimes. But ask yourself, what is it you actually owe? Your entire personhood, and then more. We gave you your past, now give us your future. The Student urges us to refuse. If schools are a feeder system for churning out good citizens, embrace being a bad citizen. Embrace being a bad subject, a bad student, a bad child, a bad person: a revolutionary. Remember that the Asian American Movement was birthed in the fires of student protest. * students everywhere
The Emergency
Image description: A black and white digital ink painting depicting a white figure floating in the top center of the page with arms stretched out. The background is gray and black, with a streak of light above the figure. Below the figure is a white mushroom cloud and dark broken landscape.
The Emergency is the twenty-fifth card in the major arcana. It is enormous--a city 85% underwater, planes flying into buildings, an Executive Order. But the nation’s Emergency is and is not yours. “The browning of America” looks and sounds like a tornado siren; it travels as a warning. Stories told about but not with you--stories that look and sound like you, are the same color and shape of you, but are not you. Terrorist. Go back somewhere. Infesting the Ivy League. Not American. Your niquab, Paj Ntaub, kirpan are crises of their making. The Emergency is product and carrier of xenophobia and settler white supremacy. But this card also reminds us that every Emergency contains emergence; we always have the capacity to emerge from Emergency. It will not be easy. The world you emerge into remains inhospitable: a nationalism that does not want you, that names its necropolitics “relief efforts.” And yet. You--grandchild, progeny, new Ancestor--will emerge, not in “resilience,” but in explicit resistance of the “good” death--how they kill us and say “oh, but look how good they were at dying.” A refutation of the ways your family, your community, your self, have been folded into, evacuated from, silenced in this place that names itself melting pot. Beloved, you are alchemizing a world wholly outside of theirs. You are opening in Emergency. * Simi Kang
The Crip
Image description: A black and white digital ink painting depicting a person holding a sword sitting covered with white blanket that is pierced by many swords. Behind the person, two additional arms reach up, one arm holding a sword hilt with blade pointing down perhaps into the torso or bed, the other arm holding a sword upward, the blade blending into a large star in a circle of light, resembling a wheel. There are two additional stars in the background.
The Crip is the twenty-sixth card in the major arcana. Not a magical cripple, not tragic or inspirational or I-could-never-be-you! Just an ordinary, extraordinary disabled person, with their ear defenders and heating pad, making art, making trouble, making rest. You are, as disabled Black queer poet Audre Lorde taught us, always defining yourself for yourself, so as not to be “crunched into other people's fantasies... and eaten alive.” When this card comes to you, it points to disabled wisdom coming into your life. Are you newly disabled, or newly claiming a disabled identity? Or are you an old hand, but coming into a new disability experience? Are you experiencing disability as silent shame, vulnerable power, or beloved community and struggle? Meditate on how you want to use your one wild and precious crip life. The Crip asks you to consider how you are finding and claiming your power, sitting with isolation and struggle, and finding kin, including kinship with yourself. If you are not disabled (or aren’t yet), ask yourself the same questions. How are you learning from, respecting, centering, and enjoying disabled art, politics, community, and magic? How are you dreaming disabled dreams of a world where every body-mind is loved and valued on our own terms? * Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha