Making Majority: Majority Consciouness and Black
Feminist Protest Poems
For the Raleigh
Reclaimers
Nov. 3 2011
Alexis Pauline Gumbs
Let’s make some
noise to stay warm out here!!!
Make some noise if you are part of that 99% they keep talking about on
the news! Make some noise if you
love how our people in Oakland took over the highway and closed down a major
port in their general strike yesterday! Make some noise if you grew up working class. Make some noise if you are queer. Make some noise if you are in college
now or if you have a college degree. Take a deep breath and make some noise if you are a
black feminist!!!!!!! And
make some noise if you are a white person…
Yeah.
Majority is complicated. And it can be exhilarating. And it can be facist. And it can tell the truth. And it can lie to our faces. The truth is that we are
profoundly interconnected. We are
bigger than ourselves. We are
sharing something that we don’t know how to describe, right this second with
all the people who live now and all the people who have ever lived. We are sharing something right now with
every energetically linked piece of matter on the planet. We are huge. We are more than 99% we are cosmic
eternal quantum dust crashing into itself. The vibration we just made from shouting is more than
we can know it is.
At
the same time, majority is complicated.
I live in Durham, North Carolina.
A majority people of color city with a majority white occupy
movement. Majority is complicated. Because the tricky statistics of
majority has been used as a tool of white supremacy to create norms for a long
time, it is not merely a coincidence that one of the largest, most compelling,
media-effective and participatory convergences of direct action that I have
witnessed uses the colonizing military language of occupation. This is where white descendents
of settler colonialists get off calling themselves native North Carolinians,
for example. And this is an
important question, not just of terminology, but also of mathematical
understanding, because it is not merely a coincidence that the most marketable
direct action we are participating in right now coincides with many actual
imperialist occupations by the US around the world and the ongoing occupation
of this land that something now called the United States stole through
genocide. I’m a black
feminist nerd, I teach about black
feminist poetry and when it comes to our power, when it comes to our revolution
I care a lot about what words we choose and what numerical reality we
imply. But I don’t want to throw
the baby out with the bathwater.
It matters to me that what makes folks love this movement of reclaiming
our lives and protesting against the violence of capitalism is a deep and
grounded energy, tapped into a planetary connection which is actually not the
same thing as whatever energy has caused white people to believe that they are
normal, straight people to believe that they are normal, middle class people to
believe that they are entitled to whatever the abject poverty of women of color
around the world and finger breaking work of working class people in this country invisibly buys us. These two things, the majorly transformative
power of interconnected struggle and love and the majorly status quo affirming
reproduction of normalcy, in my mathematical opinion , are not equal. They are not equally powerful. The first one just might get us the
unimaginable world we deserve, and the other one will at best case get us back
to the messed up place we were 5 years ago.
It
is the statistically significant difference between saying. “Hey! I
am part of the 99%. Everyone else
is just like me and I am just like everyone else and I deserve the job and
education I always thought I was entitled and damn the 1% fat cats for still
being able to maintain what I always thought I deserved and could get if I
worked hard enough and was smart enough and white enough and straight enough
for long enough.” It is the
difference between saying that and saying
“I am part of this planet and I am interconnected with all life. I refuse to continue to contribute my
energy to a system that is killing all of us. I refuse to consent to the fragmentation of capitalism and I
commit to building power creatively with everyone and everything that is
different to me towards our common survival which could also be called
love. I am interconnected
with everything and I am promising with my body to reclaim the truth. I am connected to you from a deeper
palce than I can see and I am doing my best to act accordingly.”
Y’all
see how these are not the same things?
And I care about this movement.
And so I am bringing what I love most into this conversation, that which
has brought me most clarity and refined my actions. Also known as the longstanding intersectional super stars of
keepin’ it complicated all days in all ways…I am bringing Black Feminist Poets
into the mix, towards the movement we deserve. Drawing on a very different tradition of Majority
Consciousness coming out of the anti-colonial movements in the Caribbean and in
Africa and in Asia, Black Feminist in the United States were part of the third
world consciousness raising movement, affirming the reality that the majority
of the people in the world are people of color, the majority of the people in
the world are women, and yet, the most consistently oppressed category of
almost person on the planet is this same powerful group: women of color. So as you think about
this, think about your interface with the movement of the 99% not so poetically
called “occupy” and think about what the role of women of color has been in the
segment of this movement that you have seen. Think about whether and how the absence, presence,
form of labor, forms of leadership, interventions of women of color have been
received by the false majority and whether that honors the majority of people
in the world. On New
Year’s day 1989 thinking about the prospect of a black presidential candidate
to the White House (named Jesse Jackson),
Black feminist lesbian warrior mother poet icon Audre Lorde felt
compelled to bring out fractions.
About how the US and USSR (at the time the main interlocuters in the
debate about the destiny of the planet) were only 1/8 of the population,
actually. And that African people
were also 1/8 of the population and that ½ of the people in the world were
Asian. Lorde breaks it down,
slowing to the methodical tempo of white supremacy and then speeding up :
“So most people in this world/
are Yellow, Black , Brown, Poor,
Female
Non-Christian
And do not speak English.”
Most of you, probably all of you,
know this intellectually. It goes
without saying. So why
does Audre Lorde bother to bring the math into it, in a poem, in English. The language I am using now,
which as she points out most people on the planet do not speak. Because the question of majority
is always at stake. This is why
the “I am the 99% campaign” has been so important as a way of actually talking
about the experiences of most of the people when television and the songs of
the radio seem to come from the experiences of only the super-rich in order to
encourage consumerism. If I were
to believe the “I am the 99%” posts that I have seen on the internet it would
seem that the majority of the people in the world have massive student
loans. And while I certainly
worked my way through college and took on major student loans in the process
and I think it is very important to unpack meritocracy and throw off the shame
that is associated with debt.
We also have to remember privilege. It is not that the majority of people in the world are
oppressed by student loans. The
majority of the people in the world are oppressed by capitalism such that
college is not an option. The
majority of this generation of college students may have student loans, but
these two things are not the same.
Because another important thing about Lorde’s poem is
that she maintains difference. She
is not arguing that everyone on the planet is the same, she is giving us the
fractions. There is actually so
much difference on the planet that is completely left out of the
conversation. So the liberatory
question is not how can we all lump together as the same thing, the real
question is the one Audre Lorde asked in her essay on the creative power of
difference, and which, incidentally Angela Davis, black feminist freedom
fighter raised at the Wall Street encampment a few days ago:
"How
can we come together in a unity that is complex and emancipatory? Differences
must not be merely tolerated but seen as a fund of necessary polarities between
which poles creativity can spark like a dialectic."
And indeed, as many people before me
have said the most important and exciting thing about this whole movement that
we are participating in is that it truly has brought different people who are
not generally in the same spaces and not generally speaking to each other,
together in powerful ways, and asked all of us to be creative in our listening
through the demands of direct democracy. It inspired Angela Davis to say last weekend that “The
old majorities are the new majorities,” that there is something, awakened,
referenced, remembered by this contemporary movement that precedes it, that the
majority that we invoke is not simply the breakdown of American wealth among
the living, but actually includes our collective ancestral power, including the
power and resilience of the indigenous inhabitants of this land and including
the power of the enslaved people who build and bled into this structure and
loved anyway, and including all of those movement warriors who have burnt out,
gotten sick and died, been killed via hate violence or by police. It means when we invoke majority we are
also saying, we are all here, our mandate for changing the world is certainly
bigger than those of us who have the time to be here physically and is bigger
even than the combined bodies of those of us who have survived this system to
this point. Our mandate to change
the world is old and it honors our ancestors and it calls up their energy.
Nikki
Finney, a black feminist lesbian poet from South Carolina believes that there
is such as thing as ancestral rage.
That oppression in the present not only disrespects and dishonors those
of us living through it, but it also disrespects the work and truth and
brilliance of those who came before us, who deserved better than what they
experiences and who expect more from us than this. In her first collection of poems On Wings Made of Guaze, Finney has a protest poems that speaks
out against the Atlanta Child murders, a rash of murders and disappearances of
Black children in Atlanta, the city where I grew up, and where Finney lived at
the time of the murders which began in 1979, the same year that closer to home in Greensboro, the KKK
opened fire on economic and racial justice organizers at a rally in the middle
of the day. Which is also
the same year that in Boston 12 black women were found dead day after day in 3
short months. In each case the
police did not respond to the murders as murders. In the case of the Greensboro massacre the people who were
attacked were the ones brought up on charges. What does one do in a year like 1979 where the lives of
black women, black children and black activists are so clearly devalued by the
state, and how is it related to what we do this year, when Troy Davis is
sacrificed to the right of police officers to threaten people to get false
testimonies and to fulfill their so-called justice agenda by choosing an
oppressed person to prosecute for any crime that happens? When those who are having to face the
music about the low value of their lives are more and more of the population that used to feel safe and worthy
all the time.
Nikki
Finney invokes a majority constructed of time and the natural world to do
something related to what we are doing here today and in the next couple of
days when we move whatever little money we have out of the big banks and into
the community credit unions, asking for a new set of accounts. In a poem that she dedicates to “the
children of Atlanta, the children we claim who died, who are dying because they
are Black….for the children whose lives we claim and whose deaths now claim
us” Finney calls on a higher sense
of balance and justice than what the world bank would use to classify debt and
who is a drain on the system. For
those, who like me, were not born yet in 1979, we have to remember that 1979 is
the same year that Ronald Reagan won the presidential election with a campaign
that centered on the characiture of the welfare queen and the untrue projection
that the majority of people on welfare were black women who were cheats, that
the primary beneficiaries were black children who were a drain on the national
budget and didn’t deserve anything.
It is a major year for the growth of what we now understand as global
neoliberal capitalism, a system of debt-making in the name of restructuring on
the planet. 1979 is also the year
that the major institution that laid the groundwork for what we know of as the
Radical Right was created, called
the Moral Majority. See what
I mean. Majority is complicated,
and everyone invokes it when they feel like it So what kind of Major are we?
Nikki Finney calls on the world to
witness the violence against Black children saying:
world
don’t ever come to us again
heart in hand
hoof in mouth
ancient eyes in full bloom
don’t even look this way
asking to replenished
to be restocked
we are paid in full
for this
and for the next millenniums
incensed enough we are
until this world ends
and something else begins
paid up we are
tell your hands world
sign it out to your fingers
insist that your eyes remember
how this time
we have overpaid you
we owe nothing
no more
pass this word on
to the rivers behind you
for the next one thousand years
we are paid in full
In the economic frame of 1979, this
is a big deal. In fact in the
current economic frame where most of us are in debt, and those of use who don’t
have the credit to get any more debt are positioned to conceptually owe
something to the society that profits off our lack of choices this poem is very
revolutionary. Look at the
violence we are experiencing, Finney’s poem says, what kind of balance is this? What kind of accountability. Forget it. We do not owe anything. Not only because our lives have
been unjustly sacrificed in many ways, not only in honor of those ancestors who
were forcibly removed from this very places, or those other ancestors who were
forcibly brought to the place and built it for free without freedom, but also
because we are beyond the economic calculations that make up our lives. We are more than a market. And as Finney’s poetics reveal,
we persist beyond that which would crunch us into numbers as debt. The “We are” of the poem moves out the
normal position within a sentence.
In the second to last stanza of the poem she offers “incensed enough we
are, paid up we are” instead of we are incensed enough, we
are paid up. The “we are” the
stubborn miracle of our existence, is still there, yoda like, after the
descriptive action. And actually,
the original construction that she starts with “we are paid” leaves poetic
ambiguity about who we are actually , the first line “in full we are paid” is an archaic construction that leaves
questions about what is the subject of the sentence. We, paid.
Is paid an action, an adjective.
Is full a place to be.
Looking at Finney’s poem about reckoning accounts makes me wonder about
the economic arguments we have been making from a poetic standpoint. We have been affirming that
we are the 99%.
Individualizing: “I am the
99%” Now is the time to look
critically 99% percent we are.
To truly examine what we are part of beyond the desperate gratitude of
being part of something is the task before us. What is truly major about this, and how does it impact
what we do. To use Nikki Finney’s
language who claims us, where is the accountability that transcends how
disgruntled we are about our bank accounts? Who do we honor with these actions?
What
this movement is demonstrating is that where we place our bodies is a question
of accountability, honor and claim.
In Philadelphia and other places explicit solidarity with, and
leadership by homeless Philadelphians who have been criminalized for claiming
space in the streets has been crucial.
What does it mean for people with homes to place their privileged bodies
between the action of the police and the right of a homeless person to sleep
somewhere. What does it mean for
the outrage at police acts of repression and violence in several cities to be
linked in the news media, in the form of images and focus, on the fact that so
many white people are being arrested, so much of the population that the day
before they became protesters, were inequitably over-served by the violence of
the police against more traditionally oppressed communities? Tear gas canisters and billy
clubs, rubber bullets and the training language among the police that the
non-violent orchestrated protests around the country should be treated as
riots? One way the Wall Street
incarnation of this movement responded to some of these questions was to use
the mass of people reclaiming the street create a direct action in Harlem,
specifically challenging the violent racist practice of the police stopping and
searching black people on the streets. June Jordan, black feminist poet with intimate and
violent experience with the actions of the New York City police department,
again invoked what I call black feminist math, the alchemy of poetry and
proportions to look at the meaning of police violence, in one of her most
famous poems; Poem on Police
Violence:
On the heels of the acquittal of
police officer Thomas O’Shea for
the murder of a 10 year old unarmed black boy named Clifford Glover who was
running away from O’Shea.
The agreement by a jury that Thomas O’Shea was justified in his action
because of how threatening black children are to grown white police
officers with guns. Thomas O’Shea was recorded saying while
his police radio was on: “die you little motherfucker” as he shot 10 year old
Clifford in the back. In court he
defended himself by saying “I didn’t see the size nor nothing else. Only the color.”
So June Jordan asks:
“Tell me something
what you think would happen if
everytime they kill a black boy
then will kill a cop…
you think the accident rate would
lower
subsequently?”
And she goes into the math of it;
“18 cops in order to subdue on man
18 strangled him to death in the
ensuing scuffle (don’t
you idolize the diction of the
powerful: subdue and
scuffle
oh my) and that the murder
that the killing of Arthur Miller
on a Brooklyn
street was just a “justifiable
accident” again
(again)”
How do we live in a world where our
bodies are not equal. Where the
life of a police officer and the life of a black child are not equal. Where to be honest, the white body of a
college student and that body of color of a college student are not seen the
same as police or school administrators. Where safety means different things for those of us
who have survived sexual violence.
Where the bodies of homeless people and the bodies of students, where
the bodies of students and the bodies of workers do not balance out into any
kind of equation. How do we use
our privilege? Where do we place our bodies? Who should get arrested? Where should we stand in order to
stand up for each other? Who should do what kind of work? 18 to one or one to one? Beyond Jordan’s propositions about
proportions are the places where she falls out of rhythm and reveals that
actually what a life is equal to cannot be quantified. It only be approached by poetry. She says
“sometimes the feeling like amaze
me baby
comes back to my mouth and I am
quiet”
“sometimes thinking about the 12th
House of the Cosmos
or the way your ear ensnares the
tip
of my tongue or signs that I have
never seen
like DANGER WOMEN WORKING”
Our bodies are possible futures
that end when we are sacrificed by the state or by each other. Amazement. Signs that we have never seen. Our bodies are places where love
gets actualized and electrified. That one body that you live in, the body of a person
that you love is not interchangeable with anything on a one to one or eighteen
to one basis. How do we hold the
math and the meaning together in a way that honors everyone here and everyone
who is not here for any reason and everyone we remember and everyone we hope will
be born. Majority is complicated.
And
finally how do will fill this time, activate our purpose, understand the
interconnected issues that my not be calculable into unpaid bills or
percentages of debt to be decreased, or lost retirement savings or years left
to work? How do we hold the ongoing violence of genocide in mind while
insisting and benefiting from the language of occupation on stolen land? How do we account for the needs of the
majority of us who are survivors or co-survivors of sexual violence and many
other forms of trauma in an anarchist or directly democratic space like
this. The last black
feminist poem I will bring is Ntozake Shange’s With No Immediate Cause.
Where she reminds us what is going
on in our society most of the time:
“every 3 minutes a woman is beaten
every five minutes a woman is raped
every ten minutes a lil girl is
molested”
She goes through her day
encountering the traumatic repetition of system violence, using the statistics
generated by the movement to end violence against women to create another
majority, the perpetual presence of violence, and the perpetual traumatic
reawakening of survivors to the trauma they have experienced. As a survivor and a person who is
horrified by any act of gendered violence, she has to wonder if each person she
encounters participated in the routine practice of violence at some minute,
three minutes ago or 30 years ago.
And when she reads her newspaper outraged that they report:
“there is some concern
that alleged battered women
might start to murder
their husbands & lovers with no
immediate cause”
We should think about those in this
movement of the 99% who dismiss the concerns of survivors of sexual violence
about what it means to truly create safety, not only from the police, but also
within our progressive movement where gendered violence is still an issue as it
is within all communities. We
should think about what it means to dismiss those concerns in favor of more
“immediate” priorities, like how to look badass and have an encampment. We should think about those who
despite the critique of the language of occupation brought by indigenous
activists and allies again and again feel like at this point the brand is more
important than our outrage. That the immediate issue is the banks and that
settler colonialism is an issue that is somehow over, when the land is still
occupied, when genocide is a traumatic violence that we experience right now in
the present through the continued disrespect and refusal to acknowledge
indigenous presence and history all over this continent. And we should learn from Shange
when in response to the nonsense about no immediate cause, and the
administrative inconvenience that the self-defense of survivors of gendered
violence would cause she says,
“I spit up I vomit I am screaming
we all have immediate cause
every 3 minutes
every 5 minutes
every 10 minutes
every day…”
We have cause to stand up for each
other. Immediately. And ethical majority, means
acknowledging that time is full with reasons to listen to each other, to
support each other, to transform ourselves towards true solidarity with each
other across so many differences. Thank
you for finding immediate cause to act on what you believe in. Thank you for filling your time with
this experiment of how we can live and for how long together. For asking how solid our solidarity can
be. You are more than 99%. You are the whole future. You are doing this in the sight of our
ancestors and the trees that used to be here and the sun that could rise. And history will ask us what was this
mostly about, will ask, while making major history, what kind of a majority did
we make together? And when
it adds up and we answer I hope all my black feminist ancestors and elders will
be prouder than a math problem, proud like a poem beating in the middle of your
heart, in the ground and all around.
I hope you will be proud of who we were. This complicated majority. All of us.
Thank you.
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