Small Revolutions
with Joshua P. Matthews
The NY-Based Cyclist and Writer on Biking Everywhere
and the Outlaw Aspect of the Outdoors
- Interview: Sydney Allen-Ash
- Photography: Christopher Currence
In 2008, Joshua P. Matthews decided to stop taking the subway. While the decision was initially practical—the infuriatingly unreliable New York City L train was the source—after he committed to biking everywhere, the refusal gained a spiritual weight. “[The subway] felt like a type of captivity,” Matthews told me over the phone. Reclaiming his mobility was essential to his sense of freedom. It was also this decision that catalyzed the slow creation of a 108-piece “toolbox” of all-weather Arc’teryx cycling gear that Matthews documented in his book, HARD-SHELL®, published in April 2022, which I wrote the foreword to. While it may seem small—choosing to cycle over riding the train—by frustrating the boundaries around his body and space Matthews is connected to a lineage of Black artists and intellectuals who have been doing the same.
In a 2016 panel discussion entitled The Black Outdoors, writer and academic Saidiya Hartman and poet and scholar Fred Moten explore the relationship between Blackness and place. Here The Black Outdoors (a phrase not directly associated with Hartman or Moten but chosen by the talk’s hosts), refers to both scholars’ thinking around Blackness as a perimeter, a liminal topography where the forced conditions of our existence as Black people complicate the binary between the inside and the out. A place where our historical exclusion from both the humanity of home and the freedom of the outdoors is constantly recreated. As Hartman says, though we are freed, we still experience the “threat of enclosure.”
While this perpetual fugitivity, as Moten calls it, is terrorizing and often lethal, we can also find joyful chaotic agency in the act of refusal. Moten’s articulation that stuck with me was his call to “refuse that which has been refused to you.” This generative refusal is not merely taking up the opposition, but refusing the very logic that created the opposition in the first place. After we embark on this unfortunate and necessary work we can find ourselves welcomed into what Sarah Jane Cervenak, one of the panels’ hosts calls “this community of outed outsiders, reveling in outness.”
For Matthews it seems this gear, this “toolbox” of all-weather clothing, is a uniform of this “outed outsider,” allowing Matthews to revel in the “outness” he has made his home. In HARD-SHELL® Matthews writes, “I welcome battle through these articles of clothing…they are tools, necessary in preserving my effort to endure.” Matthews embraces what he calls the “outlaw” nature of Blackness and rebukes any other affiliation including the whiteness of cycling culture, the blindness of fashion fandom, and the sanitized pastorality of “the outdoors.”
While Matthews acknowledges that the resilience of Black people is a tragedy, he also emits a pride in our endurance, “that is one of the greatest treasures of being Black…We don't get weathered. We actually do the weathering.”
Sydney Allen-Ash
Joshua P. Matthews
You don’t use the words “collecting” and “collection” in relation to this book. Why not, and what other words resonate in their place?
I've always heard people say, "Oh, Josh, you have a collection." I think that's just the only word that people know to use when they see a multitude of one particular thing. I think, especially in the mid-2000s, it became this cool thing and I hated it. Because slowly what happened was people forgot that there was purpose. This idea of having things for the sake of having them always reminded me of something colonial. People having things that don't necessarily belong to their life—to me, that's wasteful.
So, while I may have a bunch of one thing, know that it is for a purpose. You get to a certain level, you require some similar but different tools, but they are all being used. That's why I always say toolbox.
Having to go into the weather on the bike all the time it's like, "I'm riding long distance, short distance. I'm going to be on the bike more today so I'll bring this one. It's colder today, I'll use this one. It's going to be heavy rain, I'm going to use this one." All these little things that you notice if you actually do something. I have to think about those details because every time you go outside on that bike in this city, there's a good chance that you might not come back. I cannot be out there inferior because I’m putting my life on the line.
Yes, things should have an aesthetic quality. But something that illuminates a look is how well it works. When things are amazing in their utility, I grow an attraction that is so deep for them because it's like, "Oh, wow. I see all the advantages of how you're allowing me to be better." And to have a far greater reach than just, like, "I look good." I don't need things to just look at. Because I'm never standing still for too long. I'm always moving. So things that can move with me become much more attractive.
Do you think about the performance aspect of cycling through the city, not so much performance in terms of high-performing sport, but performance in terms of theater?
Yes. I definitely possess an exhibitionist-type quality. My brother used to always say, "Man. Motherfuckers always looking at us, man. You a Matthews. They always going to look at you, man. Never forget. We always shine." And he was right. It's not something that I ever looked for but it's just something that I've noticed.
Yeah, totally.
It attracts people. I'm very comfortable on a bike. I always have been. And I always push the limits, I want to see how far I can actually go. And it's not because people are watching. I just happen to be in New York City and there's people everywhere.
A friend of mine, Sean Crawford, was like, "Man, I saw you with your silly ass going across the car part of the bridge. You on the part with the cars! What is wrong with you?!" I was like, "It's faster. I didn't feel like taking the bridge."
I know people watch, but I'm never doing it because they're watching. It's also like, those things that they're watching is me actually honing my craft. It's me getting more comfortable and really feeling free. That's really what you're watching. That's the freedom that I have flowing through me because that's how I feel.
It doesn't matter if it's a stretch of dirt or miles of concrete, it's mine. It's a city. It belongs to everybody.
Photography by Reggie Casagrande ©, 2000.
Photography by Ryo Kumazaki, COMMA LLC.
Why didn't you want to talk about those themes of power, freedom, and race explicitly in the book, and instead leave it for people to discover?
I know there are many audiences reading the book and what I really wanted people to do was take my words and see themselves. Some people have never actually had to deal with the fact that their freedom is in jeopardy. That's something that I've lived with my entire life. And pretty much every other Black person has had to deal with their entire life. No Black person in America, or probably the world, has ever really felt free.
But there's an aspect to it that remains true for everybody, no matter what walk of life you come from. And in that sense, I wanted people to see that there will be so many things that will potentially try to thwart your freedom, but you have to see past that. Yes, things are holding us back, but you have to actually be vigilant in pushing against them, and that's the only way you'll get that freedom.
Anytime I talk to people, they're like, "You ride your bike everywhere. That's so hard." Well, this shit ain't easy, and that's the thing about freedom. It is hard. It is ugly. It's hard work to achieve any next step. The types of things that allow you to get the confidence to try to achieve some level of freedom—these are the small revolutions that have to happen before the big one.
One of the other concepts that you choose to use and reframe is the phrase “the outdoors.”
Every time I think of the word “outside,” I always think of the word “outlaw.” And there is no person more outside than Black people. Regardless of how you've chosen to live your life, if you're [literally an] outlaw or not. We're kind of all inherently outlaw. That’s what was placed upon us, this idea that we are outlawed just because we exist. So, I'm home outside. I'm home because I've always been considered outside, so fuck it, I'll be outside, and I will turn every outside into what I want it to be. It will now become my play land. It doesn't matter if it's a stretch of dirt or miles of concrete, it's mine. It's a city. It belongs to everybody.
How can it be such a conundrum for people? Like, "Oh, you like to do these things? You like to bike?" Meeting older white guys who are fascinated with my bikes or whatever. Half of their question is, "That's a nice bike." And I know the other part of it is, "How'd you get that shit?" You know what I mean? Very fucked up. So, that's what I'm saying like, yo, we're always outside. We're always foreign to any of these things. Again, Black people go outside all the time. It's not actually foreign to us. It's just foreign to the spaces that we have been assigned to in others' minds.
Sydney Allen-Ash is a writer, strategist, and podcast host interested in sports and society.
- Interview: Sydney Allen-Ash
- Photography: Christopher Currence
- Images/Photos Courtesy Of: COMMA LLC
- Date: July 22, 2022
