playing with wor(l)ds: a manifesto

my cabinet of curiosities; or my shelf of delights.

Years ago, I told an historian that I was looking forward to “playing in the archives.” This historian chastised me, asserting that (I’m paraphrasing here): “Some of us work in the archives.”

Their message was clear: my insistence on play was somehow sacreligious, both to the work of the historian and to the archival materials themselves.

Fortunately, I’m not an historian.

Young children excel at play. It’s the way they learn the world. They aren’t bound by conventions or rules or regulations or expectations. They are living in the moment, responding to whatever moves them in whatever way they please. Right there. Right then.

kid birthday party science experiments.

When I say I’m going to play, I mean it. Because play is what happens when I allow myself to move as, when, where, and how my body, my spirit, and my mind desire.

And because play is not bound by rules or expectations, and because it is all about making worlds, plays is inherently – and always – utopian.

Play makes worlds.
And I think that’s an ethos to live by.

a whole lot of flute players from Tulou’s Méthode de flûte, Op. 100.

Play allows me to listen, read, and imagine differently.

In Borderlands/La Frontera, when Gloria Anzaldúa writes in several languages – simultaneously – and moves fluidly between poetry and narrative, she’s actively creating the borderlands consciousness of which she speaks. By playing with words – in multiple languages and multiple forms – she’s playing with worlds.

Or when Monique Wittig, in The Straight Mind and Other Essays, asserts that lesbians were not women, she’s making a point about language, and about how words are fully embedded in the social, the cultural, the political. Woman, she argues, cannot be understood outside of man. What seems, on the surface, like mere semantics – word play – is a deeply political statement that asks us to think about how we use words, and to really consider what words might mean.

This, too, is at the heart of poet Sadiqa de Meijer’s alfabet/alphabet, a memoir of living between Dutch and English.

In 2019 essay, de Meijer writes.

Boom, grond, and lucht exist where I live now as well. Trees, ground, and sky.

The ground is not that old ground; it is another continent.

The sky is continuous with the old one, but it feels different. It isn’t as vast and fresh, or so haunted by hurried clouds. Here the people do not call it lucht, and so it isn’t also air, which means it is impossible to breathe this sky.

Sky cannot fill your lungs or flow into your bloodstream.

Only lucht can do that.

“The Poetic Pleasures and Pains We Can Only Express in Dutch,” LitHub, June 2019.

Words shape worlds.

In Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, for example, Saidiya Hartman rethinks the whole concept of waywardness, moving away from its function as a tool of social discipline and control towards a utopian reading: waywardness, she argues, is an experiment in freedom: it is how young Black American women in the early twentieth century embraced possibilities that had never previously been available to them.

When Narungga poet Natalie Harkin prints her grandmother and great-grandmother’s letters to the Australian state’s Aborigines Protection Board and Children’s Welfare Board onto banana leaves and weaves them into baskets, she is reclaiming family histories, bringing their words home from the colonial archive, and reframing what constitutes ‘history,’ By weaving the colonial archive, she is actively remaking wor(l)ds.

When trans and non-binary folks today challenge binary pronouns and offer a range of alternatives, they are using language to bring new worlds into being.

Play, for me, is and will always be utopian, and it is and always will be political. And in the horrors that surround us right now, I believe that play is perhaps even more important than it has ever been.

We need joy.
We need laughter.
We need our imaginations.

We need play.

Interested in learning more about the utopian possibilities of creative play? You can learn about my offerings here.

A quiltlet I made in 2024.

 (c) Sonja Boon, 2025.