littleblackbook

Be Bold Be Re(a)d: The Podcast

2009-10-29T23:51:00.001-04:00

3 years ago women of color came together and transformed what it meant to transform terror on Halloween, declaring October 31st Be Bold Be Red Day, a day for women of color and allies to speak out against violence against women. And 30 years ago women of color came together to respond to violence in the same critical and poetic spirit.

Towards the world the we all deserve, fully transformed from the misogyny and internalized racism we face in popular music to the frightening expendability of the lives and bodies of women of color this podcast places the brave voices of women telling the truth about gendered violence over the remixed sounds of Miles Davis. This year we take every sound back, starting with our own voices and the background that seeks to silence them.

Listen with your community, your class, your friends, your study group, your church, your crew, pass the link on or listen by yourself and see, hear and wear red.

listen here

[audio http://brokenbeautiful.wordpress.com/files/2009/10/real-be-bold-be-red-podcast.mp3]

or download here: http://brokenbeautiful.wordpress.com/files/2009/10/real-be-bold-be-red-podcast.mp3

Eternal Summer of the Black Feminist Mind Presents: Pauli Murray

2009-10-12T21:38:00.001-04:00

Eternal Summer of the Black Feminist Mind Presents:

pauli murray as "the imp!"pauli murray as "the imp!"

This November, in honor of the 99th birthday of Durham’s own Black Feminist, Civil Rights Lawyer, Radical Preacher Pauli Murray Eternal Summer of the Black Feminist, Southerners on New Ground and the Pauli Murray Project present:

Gendered Im(p)ossibility: A Conversation Through Photographs

Drawing on a number of photographs of Pauli Murray from the Schelsinger Library and featuring audio from an interview with Pauli Murray, this promises to be a rich conversation about gender presentation, identity and queer history and reclamation.

Please join us on Monday November 2nd

at 6pm

at Lex’s Inspiration Station

and please bring a dish to share!

See you there!

love,

Lex

Save the Date! Lex speaking @ Rutgers

2009-10-11T23:27:00.002-04:00

Hey loved ones in the Tri-State Area…

Save the date. I would love to see your faces in the audience when I speak at Rutgers-Newark later this month. I’ll be talking specifically about the radical queer anti-imperialist black lovefest between Joseph Beam and Audre Lorde and how we can act like we know!

theirs and yours,

lex

UPDATE:

QUEERING AMERICAN STUDIES: A CONFERENCE AT RUTGERS-NEWARK

Essex Room, Robeson Student Center, 350 Martin Luther King Blvd., Newark, NJ

Friday Oct. 23, 2009

9:30 A.M. Welcomes

10 A.M. Session

Queering American Studies

“ ‘Wounded Attachments’ and Redress: Undoing Filipina Victimhood Under Colonial Rule”

Robert Diaz, Wayne State University;

“Queer Relative: Audre Lorde, Joseph Beam and Diasporic Solidarity”

Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Duke University;

“The Diva Ends/The Diva’s Ends”

Licia Fiol-Matta, Lehman College, City University of New York;

“The Queer and the Cosmopolitan”

Hiram Perez,Vassar College.

Moderator: Laura Lomas, Acting Director of Women and Gender Studies

and Associate Professor of English and American Studies, Rutgers-Newark

1:30 P.M. Session

Standing in a Ditch: Queer Encounters with the Public

Questions, answers and discussion with all four guest speakers.

Moderators: Aimee Cox, Assistant Professor of African and African American Studies,

Rutgers-Newark, and Taylor Black, graduate student, Graduate Program in American Studies, Rutgers-Newark

3 P.M. Comments: Carlos A. Ball, Professor of Law, Rutgers University School of Law (Newark)

3:10 P.M.: Closing Remarks, Beryl Satter, Chair and Associate Professor of History, Rutgers-Newark

3:30 P.M. Reception, Robeson Gallery

Co-sponsored by the Graduate Program in American Studies, the Women and Gender Studies Program, and the Institute on Ethnicity, Culture and the Modern Experience. Supported by a grant from the Office of the Vice President for Research and Graduate and Professional Education at Rutgers University.

Atlanta Loved Ones!: Come Hear Me Talk with Gloria Steinem and Beverly Guy Sheftall

2009-10-06T22:27:00.002-04:00

Founding the Future: A Conversation with Beverly Guy Sheftall & Gloria Steinem, moderated by Alexis Pauline Gumbs
Thursday, November 5, 7:30pm (Doors at 6:30) at the Georgia Tech Hotel
Young feminist scholar and activist Alexis Pauline Gumbs will moderate a discussion with feminist icons Beverly Guy-Sheftall and Gloria Steinem about their places in the history of feminism and the possibilities the future holds.
Tickets are $35 for general admission; priority seating is also available. Tickets can be purchased online or in person at Charis Books & More. Founding the Future ticket info...

This is part of a beautiful weekend full of events celebrating and exemplifying the life and impact of the oldest Feminist Bookstore in the SouthEast! Come through!

Charis Circle and Charis Books & More Announce

Feminism, Books, & Beyond: Celebrating 35 Years of Charis Community

Atlanta, GA - November 4-8, 2009 - Charis Books & More will celebrate its 35th year in business with several commemorative birthday events in Atlanta. The two largest events will benefit Charis Circle, the store's non-profit sister organization, to support free community programs such as literary events, open mics, writing workshops, skill shares, activist discussions, film screenings, and more.

Charis Circle and Charis Books & More are pleased to present the following events as part of the 35th Birthday Celebration:

Atlanta Queer Literary Festival and Charis Birthday Kick-off Reception
Wednesday, November 4, 7:00-9:00pm at Charis
The AQLF and Charis will hold a joint reception to kick off the festival and Charis's birthday events, which will be going on simultaneously in Atlanta. The reception will feature performances by the following local women poets: Lisa Allender (emcee), Malika, Krystal Tift, Alice Teeter, Louisa Merchant, Sharon Saunders, Sincere, Charlene Ball and Libby Ware. This event is free.

Founding the Future: A Conversation with Beverly Guy Sheftall & Gloria Steinem, moderated by Alexis Pauline Gumbs
Thursday, November 5, 7:30pm (Doors at 6:30) at the Georgia Tech Hotel
Young feminist scholar and activist Alexis Pauline Gumbs will moderate a discussion with feminist icons Beverly Guy-Sheftall and Gloria Steinem about their places in the history of feminism and the possibilities the future holds.

Tickets are $35 for general admission; priority seating is also available. Tickets can be purchased online or in person at Charis Books & More.

Founding the Future ticket info...

Artists & Revolutionaries: The Transformative Power of Music and Words
Friday, November 6, 7:30pm (Doors at 6:30) at Hillside International Truth Center
Charis presents an evening of art and activism with performances and readings by Pearl Cleage, the Indigo Girls, and Alice Walker. Tickets are $35 for general admission; priority seating is also available. Tickets can be purchased online or in person at Charis Books & More.
Artists & Revolutionaries ticket info...

Birthday Party & Book Sale with Author Signings
Saturday, November 7, 10:30am-8:00pm and Sunday, November 8, Noon-6:00pm at Charis
The bookstore will hold its annual birthday party and sale, featuring birthday cake, refreshments, discounts on everything, and authors on hand to sign copies of books. A complete schedule of author signings will be announced soon.

Your Mother: June Jordan and the Orchestration of Anger

2009-10-05T11:05:00.002-04:00

Hi Everyone,
This is the text of a talk I gave a few days ago at the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies at CUNY as part of an event called Rare Form.
Would love to know what you think!
love,
lex

I want to take a moment to remember the place we are in, and to remember, Audre Lorde, Toni Cade Bambara, and June Jordan who taught in the City University of New York’s SEEK opportunity program and participated in the student takeover of City College. I remember this in solidarity with the recent direct actions of the students in the University of California System.
I have to acknowledge what makes it possible for me to speak here. I am the beneficiary of generations of the righteous anger of people of color critiquing and transforming institutions and demanding space.
*This paper is dedicated to June Jordan’s mentor Fannie Lou Hamer whose birthday is October 6th and to the oldest black woman I know, my father’s godmother, cousin Floss, a self-identified “very outspoken person” who uses these words as a refrain to her ongoing critique of everything: “When ya wrong, ya wrong.”

Your Mother:
June Jordan and the Orchestration of Anger

Alexis Pauline Gumbs

Can we agree that anger is useful? We are often told that anger, especially when enacted by black women is pointless, ridiculous, amusing. A pre-existing condition. But black women’s anger must be useful. Why else would there be a weapon in the arsenal of the volunteer army of white supremacy listed on the first page of their guidebook called “the angry black woman.” Beware the angry black woman, the stalwart defenders of racism, classism and sexism are trained, pretend that her anger is spontaneous, primal, guttural, alien, anything to shift the conversation away from what she is angry about. That angry black woman must be saying something pretty dangerous to have earned her own stereotype. But fear not. Our anger is useful, and we, have our own handbook. Audre Lorde’s “The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism.” Audre Lorde teaches us why the anger of women of color is valuable:
“Anger is loaded with information and energy….Focused with precision it can become a powerful source of energy serving progress and change. Anger expressed and translated into action in the service of our vision and our future is a liberating and strengthening act of clarification.”
“Women of Color in America have grown up within a symphony of anger, at being silenced, at being unchosen, at knowing that when we survive it is in spite of a world that takes for granted our lack of humanness, and which hates our very existence outside its service. And I say symphony rather than cacophony , because we have had to learn to orchestrate those furies so they do not tear us apart.”
So this is a question of form. We have had to learn to orchestrate those furies so they do not tear us apart. I think there might be people in here who can relate to that. And some say that it was the work metabolizing hatred within academic and activist spaces, even with this university system that took them from us early. Some say it was also the lack of stable and comprehensive healthcare. In each case, this practice of orchestrating our anger so that it does not tear us apart, is not a mere literary exercise. Our survival is at stake.
So tonight, I’m going to be looking closely at some examples of the orchestration of anger by one of the angriest black feminists I know about, someone who was incredibly concerned with form: the poet, June Jordan. As the first person to spend time in the unpublished papers and correspondence of June Jordan at the Schlesinger library I read angry letter after angry letter and it is clear to me that Jordan’s anger is not spontaneous, and it is not cacophonous. This anger is orchestrated.
I would propose that June Jordan’s angry letters, especially to editors within the periodical publishing industry constitute a shadow archive, an actual body of work that we can read for it’s own insights, its robust and consistent critique of the publishing industry and it’s own poetics which can bear on our reading of Jordan’s angry published poems. (The “your mama” poem she wrote for Daniel P. Moynihan comes to mind.) If racism slept, unfortunately it doesn’t, but if racism slept, it would have nightmares about June Jordan. June Jordan is the proof of the fearsome power of the angry black woman.
And in the popular imaginary the angry black woman has a form too. The form of black woman most associated with anger is the black single mother. The person most associated with everything bad, irrational, detrimental, and scary in the popular rhetoric of the United States is the single black mother. And my work is about this connection. The thing that is so queer and so dangerous about the single, or poor, or queer black mother is that she will not shut up, will not stop standing up for hers, will not simply disappear and stop making more race problems, by which we know it is meant, stop making more problematic black people. Let me be clear, the story about the angry black woman is about fear of the power of black woman, about fear of what we can and do create. Which is, on the level of body and discourse, what Hortense Spillers calls an intervening narrative. The black mother is criminalized, as crazy, loud, angry, irresponsible, because she stands at a precarious place in the social narrative, right on the social tension over the meaning of reproduction. And June Jordan says, here I am. Be afraid. As a black sometimes poor, sometimes single and sometimes woman-partnered mother, who was also an author and journalist troubled this intersectional tension even more explicitly. So if the media of the late 20th century when Jordan was writing was committed to reproducing narrative common sense about the worthlessness of black life, the expendability of black bodies in post-industrial New York, the justification of an expanding prison state and the responsibility of black mothers for the “culture of poverty” crime and inequality, Jordan was clearly committed to something else. This is the queer thing. This is why Cathy Cohen asks for a queer politic that centers and highlights the “welfare queen.” Point blank. In a society that thinks and says and enforces the idea that black people do not deserve to exist, it is a queer thing to create and love and nurture and uplift and listen to and empower a black child. Black mothering is queer work.
In this context queer black feminist mothers June Jordan insisted in the pages of Essence Magazine, that “Poems are housework.” The form of black mothering is a queer form and form matters. Jordan framed her critique of the New York Times, Chrysalis Feminist Publication and Seven Days publication…which I will focus on here….in her perspective as a black mother who saw racism as a life or death matter. June Jordan as a someone who understood ideological racism as an act of violence, actively reproduced through the practices of the publishing industry (on TOP of the actual racist content they continued to publish.) So this is where I am coming from. This is where I come from, this legacy where creation is a queer thing, where mothering retains its deviance. The place where accountability to silenced ancestors and children who public policy says should not be born explodes into voice.
Hatred destroys. But anger and hatred are not the same. And as Lorde explains, anger is an appropriate response to hatred.
June Jordan was not afraid to be angry.
This is the place where people like those of us on this panel…who are obsessed with form get very excited. We are out and proud, we cherish an intimacy with words. We are all creative writers, we all read closely, in context. And by close here I mean intimacy. And I have to say there is something really thrilling almost electric about becoming intimate with words so full of passion and rage. Sharp words designed to slice someone out of their racist apparel on my behalf. There must be something queer about that.
I am going to start with my favorite letter actually as I was writing this I realized that I have so much to say about this letter that I won’t even have time to talk about the other letters here.
Here is the context: (it’s a little bit gossipy and involved, but I need you to know that anger doesn’t come from nowhere)
In the late 1970’s Audre Lorde was poetry editor of a “magazine of women’s culture” called Chrysalis. June Jordan was a contributing editor. Adrienne Rich was also a contributing editor, and then there was a (white feminist) editorial board. So (to be clear) there were the “advising editors” and Lorde as poetry editor who ostenisibly had input into the magazine and then there was an all white set of women who made the day to day and final decisions and there were no women of color in that room. A number of important pieces, including Lorde’s essay “Poetry is Not a Luxury “and appropriately, as you will see, June Jordan’s poem “I Must Become a Menace to My Enemies.” Lorde used her role as poetry editor to highlight poetry by emergent women of color writers, but from the beginning the editorial collective, which was based in LA and the far-flung poetry editor had communication issues, and from the very first issue Patricia Jones, a black woman writer, complained in a letter to the editor that it seemed that women of color were marginalized within the magazine. As poetry editor, Audre Lorde had a critique of the magazine that specifically centered around poetic form and space. In October 1977 Audre Lorde wrote a letter (really a small essay ) complaining expressing her frustration with the Chrysalis collective for devaluing poetry. The third issue of the publication had only 9 pages of poetry, but it had 11 pages of blank space, used ostensibly to provide transitions between articles. Lorde was most distressed by the fact that two poems by June Jordan however we crowded onto the same page, which Lorde complained gave the misperception that they were parts of the same poem and “nullified the impact of each one.” Lorde copied June Jordan on this letter. It might be the case that Jordan herself had complained to Lorde about the way that her poems appeared on the page. In a letter the next year to her new publisher Beacon Press, Jordan insists that her poetry should get the same space the Seamus Heaney’s got, increasing the projected page-length of Passion to over a hundred pages.
In 1979 the Chrysalis collective received a National Endowment for the Arts grant to produce a special issue on poetry. By this time however, Lorde was fed up with the collective and had resigned as poetry editor, an act which was covered up the collective which published a special poem in honor of Audre Lorde and continued to list her on the masthead months after she had resigned. So Lorde wrote another angry letter, this time structured with numbers. She starts with the marker of second wave feminism and questions its very existence through her critique “If the personal is indeed political then grave questions are raised by your printing a poem to me under a paragraph of factual errors and insults to contributors at the same time as the editorial board is apparently unable to deal with me as a peer.” Lorde highlights three points that she says have fallen on deaf ears in the past.

1. critiques the objectification “thingdom” of black women in the magazine, particularly in response to what she sees as a fetishistic racist article about primitivism in women’s art

2. protests the expendability (superfluity) of work by women of color within the magazine, pointing out that the one poem by a woman of color that was to be included, a poem by Toi Derricote’s was missing from the issue…she predicts that the board will respond “we never noticed”

3. and finally the Lorde protects her own authority. She is angry to have her name associated with “a poetic composition over which I have no control.”

These three issues, objectification, expendability and authority are the exact issues which are contested in that narrative about black mothering and the reproduction of racism. Lorde’s at bottom Lorde is making an accusation. You are stifling the poetic work of women of color because you are afraid of what we will create. Remember the uses of anger. Here in list format, Lorde orchestrates that anger at being unchosen, that anger at being objectified and used.
“Jordan, in solidarity and frustration wrote this letter.
Read the whole letter.
Clearly this is not written in the form of a poem. It is written in the form of a formal letter. Almost in the form of a contract, she uses the word “hereby” begins the last sentence with the word “as.” The poetics of rage also make this letter a poem. Listen to the repetition, of the key words. Black and profoundly. This is a profoundly black feminist letter.
Jordan brings the important topics of labor, mothering, and state violence explicitly into the conversation and points out the connection between the personal miscommunications within the publication, the ideological violence in the magazine’s content exclusions and editorial policies and the state violence that this narrative violence reproduces. After Susan Griffin, spokesperson at that time for the Chrysalis editorial board, failed to respond to either Lorde or Jordan’s letters and instead wrote a long pleading letter Adrienne Rich, who had also resigned in alliance and agreement with Lorde and Jordan’s accusations of racism…rudely merely cc’ing Lorde and Jordan on what remained an exchange between two white women and, as you can imagine, incensing Jordan in particular even more, Jordan makes her connection between the ideological violence of the publication and the violence of racism and imperialism writ large even more explicit:
She writes “I am most angrily and disgustedly hereby confirmed in my viewpoint that Chrysalis and its allies do not fail Black and Third world people by accident. It is a failure guaranteed by a concept of identity that excludes my own, in the broad sense of my own.”
She goes on to elaborate on “the process whereby persons such as S. G. may avoid indefinitely, it would seem, an adult and serious consideration of her particular responsibility for the fact that I must tremble for the survival likelihood of every young Black man in this country, including that of my own son.” Jordan then describes listening, in public to a radio report about “yet another white police murder of an unarmed young Black man,” in her neighborhood and sincerely thinking that this time it might be her son.
This is the brilliance of June Jordan’s anger. For Jordan everything is connected. Accountability is always on the level of life or death. This is one of the reasons that Jordan gained a reputation, especially among her liberal peers for being so “difficult” and uncompromising. A racist editorial policy is never just a racist editorial process for Jordan. Because it is racist narrative that the media reproduces in it’s mechanics and with its content allows a collective common sense, that among other things enables the public to accept the actions of a police force that treats black people as if they are not human beings, but monsters to be shot on sight. Jordan’s anger is instructive in its logic and its clarity, even if it may depend on a binary. No incident is isolated, every practice, every decision we take on either reproduces an oppressive framework, or helps to produce something different…on the terms of the civil rights mantra, if you are not part of the solution you are part of the problem. We could talk about the ethics of Jordan’s anger in conversations with work on ethic by Levinas, and Judith Butler. But we won’t. Because for one, it’s really past time for me to be talking, as advertised about the poetics of Jordan’s anger, and for two, I have decided that at least for tonight all of the theorists that I will quote, cite or talk about will be black women. So there.
Now, let’s look at the poetics:
If the racism of Chrysalis is like a death sentence to the black community…which seems to be the claim Jordan is making, she breaks out of the narrative structure of the sentence, even while parodying it with the contract like language of the letter, by breaking out into repetitive incantatory reveries.
Black women issues, Black women priorities, Black women poets
And on. The impact is cumulative and magical. It is almost as if the exclusion, tokenism, expendability and pigeon-holing of black women within the publication is undone by the spell that she is working in this first paragraph. In contrast to the publication, this paragraph is full of diverse black women, and not only that,
We have black women political analysts, black women storytellers, black women activists, black women laborers, black women mothers. We have black women that create, shape worlds, make meanings. This is not the first time the repetition of black shows up in Jordan’s body of angry letters. 10 years earlier in 1969 she had responded to a proto-bell curve pseudo-scientific article in the New York Times magazine about how black people are not capable of rational thought, with an eloquent letter with the refrain “Because I am Black.” Basically saying, because I am black I do not understand what could possibly be rational about you printing this trash to begin with. So here in the 1979 letter, the repetition of Black, capital BE and women lower-case W breaks out of the marginalizing assumption that black woman is just a slot to be filled. Or that by tokenizing black women on the advisory board but not taking their advice seriously you are somehow an inclusive publication. Remembering that “our very existence is hated outside of it’s service to the system” Jordan chooses excess, it’s raining black women hallelujah, black womanhood is so multiple it is a song. This is poet…we start with alliteration and move to rhyme, priorities, poets, painters, analysts, activists, mothers, lovers. This is a call. Suddenly the space is filled with black women, black women past present and future are called, attracted by the aesthetic, spirit crowds the discourse. This repetition, Black women, Black women, Black women, hails Fannie Lou Hamer back from beyond the grave, it hails me. Eleven times
Black women
Black women
Black women
Black women
Black women
Black women
Black women
Black women
Black women
Black women
Black women
Loving black women over and over again, day in a day out is a queer thing. This in a letter addressed to the white editorial board of Chrysalis, and then copied to Adrienne Rich, who Jordan understood to be an actively anti-racist white feminist ally, and 5 black women, Audre Lorde “my sister” Alexis DeVeaux and Gwendolen Hardwick the black women poet and artist who were attacked on the street with Jordan, Patricia Jones, the black woman who wrote the first angry letter about racism to the magazine and Barbara Smith, who as we know is a lifetime warrior for autonomous women of color publishing. Black women everything at the center of the paragraph. This is poetic because it says what we do not know how know. Right in the center of anger there it is resplendent. Ecstatic, evangelical, transformative love for self.
You cannot read this letter without knowing for sure, that June Jordan loves black women enough to fight for our existence. All Audre Lorde had to do was cc her on the letter. Beware the fierce love between black women. Profound. Jordan’s use in the next paragraph of the repeated word profoundly also make a language break. The sentence, or indictment begins in standard sentence structure, commas punctuate the accusations, hopelessly academic, pseudo-historical, incestuous. But then the failure is just too profound for the dominant language to hold. The commas drop out and the word profoundly hold the rhythm. Profoundly optional (I really love that, how a magazine that treats the lives of black women as an under prioritized “option” becomes “optional.”) Think about that for a minute. You imagine if someone called you that? Profoundly Optional. I really think that’s the most cutting point in the letter. Optional. Damn.
Alright. So profoundly holds the rhythm. Profoundly optional profoundly trifling and this is a turning point. Because you know where we are by the time we get to the word trifling, This is school-yard. This is what Jordan called black English in her classroom. No commas needed bring it home.
Profoundly upper middle-class attic white publication.
And then here is the thing that I love the most. After explaining why the publication is so dead ridiculous and optional that it need not even exist, she then actually proposes that the people publish the letter in the magazine! And this isn’t the only place she does this…after a back and forth between June Jordan and the editors of the magazine Seven Days about an article that she wrote about the outrage of a mob murder of black youth in Brooklyn, where they ask her to be less angry and more balanced, she tells them off and says if you want your readers to really know what’s going on, print this letter and give me my kill fee.
And this is a poetic act too. Sylvia Wynter, the genius Jamaican literary critic explains that the poetic is the way we make an capitalist relationship where objects relate to objects through the mediator of power obsolete, and imagine a different world by describing a relationship that cannot be described. And this is Jordan’s gesture at the end of these angry poetic queerly carefully crafted letters. You who know nothing of what publishing should be, publish this. A catch 22, if the words in the letter are true then we know they would never publish such a critique. If the words in the letter are not true then how can the publication participate in it’s own slander. I entirely expect that you will print this, she says. By which she means I dare you. I dare you. Not just to the recipient, but now to us. The shadow audience overhearing her love for us, carbon-copied. And the anger of black women is like that, a shadow archive of stolen love daring us to be afraid. And now you know about it. So what you gon’ do?

poetics of anger: june jordan's letters to the editor

2009-09-27T13:57:00.000-04:00

Hey loved ones,
Just wanted to invite you to the panel I am speaking on at the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies this coming Thursday. It would be really great to see you. And while the description they have below of our panel makes us all sound really smart and somewhat inaccessible...you should know that what I am really talking about it the hilarious and powerful poetics of angry letters by June Jordan to the editors of publications she wrote for.
Should be a good time!
Would love to see you there!
love always,
Alexis

Thursday, October 1
Rare Form: Crafting Queerness in Contemporary Literature

LGBTQ Panel Discussion

This panel explores contemporary queer literature and culture with an emphasis on form. Situating North American literary and theoretical texts in a diasporic frame, the panelists will analyze forms of literary expression through the generic lenses of language, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and race and will also consider richer and stranger forms of difference. One of the central questions raised and discussed will be: How do representations of difference impose formal restrictions upon or create new formal possibilities for a text? Taking up contemporary work on futurity, the body, motherhood, sovereignty, and visibility and voice, these presenters ask what difference it might make for contemporary queer studies to make questions of form and craft central.

Panelists: Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Ph.D. candidate, English, Africana Studies and Women's Studies, Duke University; Sarah Dowling, Ph.D. candidate, English, University of Pennsylvania; Mecca Jamilah Sullivan, Ph.D. candidate, English, University of Pennsylvania

Moderator: Jennifer Williams, Assistant Professor of English, Michigan State University

Graduate Center
Room 9207
7-9 PM

Buried Treasure

2009-09-16T10:36:00.002-04:00

Hey y'all. Last night I filled in for Nia and spoke at the annual meeting of a Rape Crisis Center in the next county. I was honored to do it and affirmed by the people in the room. Feel free to participate in the prompt at the end of the speech!
love,
lex

Grassroots Organizing Against Sexual Violence

For the annual meeting of the Orange County Rape Crisis Center

Good evening everyone! I stand here representing Nia Wilson, director of SpiritHouse and co-founder with me and others of UBUNTU, a women of color, survivor-led coalition committed, with all of you, to ending gendered and sexual violence completely by filling our communities with sustaining transformative love.

I am not Nia Wilson, but I am proud to call her my sister, mentor, comrade, loved one, and dear friend. And some would say that we “look alike” because we have a shared vision of a transformed world full of inspired communities. And by community we mean groups of people connected by geography and affinity that truly support each member in having their physical, spiritual and emotional needs met, and their amazing priceless unique gift to the world expressed.

I am also here tonight in the legacy of Audre Lorde, black lesbian feminist mother poet warrior who also used her poetry, her life and her example to stand against sexual violence. I will be using on of Audre Lorde’s lesser-known later poems, “On My Way Out I Passed Over You and the Verazzano Bridge” in her collection Our Dead Behind Us to frame my discussion about women of color survivor-led grassroots organizing. Because I strongly believe that (as our other speaker, a high school English teacher and igniter of Scene and Heard youth poetry collective will also speak to) poetry is a powerful context for transformation.

I was asked to speak specifically about what grassroots organzing looks like from the perspective of women of color, those among us who have long held the under-rewarded task of ORGANIZING EVERYTHING often in the face of slander and disrespect…the exact kind of slander and disrespect that makes sexual violence against women of color seem normal.

Audre Lorde speaks for many when she says:

History is not kind to us

we restitch it with living

past memory forward

into desire

into the panic articulation

of want without having

or even the promise of getting

And this is often the position of women of color led initiatives like ours which do not conform to the standard of non-profit organizing. Organizations like SpiritHouse, which focuses on the soul work of healing with/as those most impacted by racism, sexism and classism, and coalitons like UBUNTU, which acts on the belief that we must create whoel communities full of shared childcare, shared, music, shared meals, collective gardents, and definitely poetry in order to grow a world where people are truly accountable to each other and sexual violence is no more….groups like ours are not always legible to foundations that value social services and policy outcomes, but which often overlook the community building work, the love work. Love is sadly undervalued in the non-profit industrial complex, but we as women of color are learning to be fierce beacons of love and finding support for that work is like planting your heart in the ground you stand on, shining your faith light and tears into your community and welcoming whatever grows up. Grass. Roots.

Even the present is not kind. We restitch it with living, past memory, forward into desire.

We draw on the resources of the brilliant women of color who have come before us and who hold a light to our vision today. SpiritHouse and UBUNTU have actively used the poetic work of Audre Lorde, June Jordan, Ntozake Shange and asha bandele in our healing performances and independent publications and writing workshops.

We also ally with contemporary warriors like genius filmmaker Aishah Simmons who’s film NO! reminds us who we are and what we deserve and reminds men who are allies committed to ending sexual violence of their stake in the matter. Deconstructing male privilege means that men are not helping to end sexual violence on my behalf, they are not stopping rape from a property perspective to protect wives, mothers, daughters, etc. If you identify as a man ending rape, you are ending rape because it is not what you would want someone to do to YOU, Period.

SpiritHouse youth program which I have been involved in for the past 5 years works with some of the most criminalized members of our communities. Young black people, mostly male-identified, who have often been long-term suspended and exprelled from Durham public schools because of their involvement in gangs or street organizations. These are the people most likely to get pulled over if they drive anywhere, who have the hardest times finding jobs, who are often harassed just for walking down the street or hanging out. And no, they don’t always have the most PC gender language. We know from being accountable to and led by these young people that being treated like a criminal does not give anyone a healthier relationship to their own sexuality or anyone else’s body.

If the increased surveillance and criminalization is not the way to end sexual violence, and I strongly believe that it is not, as a survivor like most survivors of sexual violence that was enacted on me by someone in my circle of trust, how do we heal our communities?

In UBUNTU, a coalition of which SpiritHouse is a founding organizational member, we believe that when everyone’s needs are met, when we can look at each other eye to eye, when we can tell the truth about economic violence, agist silencing and sex in general, and when we can tell the even harder, rarer, riskier truth about love, we will treat each other well, we will love each other right.

The committees of UBUNTU have created poetic performances, writing groups, a community garden, a national day of truthtelling and monthly potluck dinners as investments in the belief that as Audre Lorde says:

And I dream of us coming together

encircled driven

not only by love

but by a lust for a working tomorrow

the flights of this journey

mapless uncertain

and necessary as water,

And the flights are maples. The tragic thing is that we do not know how to navigate life without violence, distrust and harmful silences. But Lorde offers us this poem:

I am writing these words as a route map

an artifact for survival

a chronicle of buried treasure

a mourning

for this place we are about to be leaving

And in the spirit of that buried treasure, that necessary digging. I have a poem that I would like you to interact with. Are you willing to interact?

The poem is called Dig (available as a PDF here: http://brokenbeautiful.wordpress.com/lexicon/dig/

And at the end of the poem (and for you reading in the comments) please respond to the prompt for your community, for yourself, or for any definition of “here” that you hold:

“If you dig here you will find ______________________”

(at the event each person stood and declared that we would find, “a poem” “love” “hope” “more digging to do” “dirt” “roots” “a proud father of three daughters” “peace” “a hundred dreams ready to be lived” “intertwining pathways” and more! And each person remained standing until the entire room was standing for the depth of healing that will truly end sexual violence. And I said…)

I was asked to speak about what grassroots organzing looks like from my perspective. I think this is what it looks like. Learning to stand against sexual violence with our whole selves. Thank you for your bravery.

Oh My Gosh! Being in this book is a dream come true!

2009-09-11T13:53:00.001-04:00

does your mama know?

(revised edition)
edited by Lisa C. Moore

By turns funny, passionate, angry and joyous, does your mama know? reflects the complexity of emotions that accompany a black lesbian’s coming out. These short stories, poems, interviews and essays—fiction and nonfiction—make up a powerful collection of original and new writing. Originally published in 1997, the 2009 revised edition of does your mama know? adds 16 new stories. Booksellers, please note the new ISBN.

ISBN-10: 0-9786251-6-1
ISBN-13: 978-0-9786251-6-0
Specs: Softcover, xx pp.
Price: $19.95
Pub. Date: May 2009
Cover art, design copyright © 1997 by Kamela Eaton

Contributors

Donna Allegra
Martine C. Barbier
L.K. Barnett
Samiya Bashir
Gwendolyn Bikis
Becky Birtha
Sharon Bridgforth
Tonia Bryan
C.C. Carter
Staceyann Chin
Cheryl Clarke
Tonda Clarke
Alexis De Veaux
Olive Demetrius
Gale “Sky” Edeawo
Tiffani Frazier
Roxane Gay
Lena-Nsomeka Gomes
Jewelle Gomez

alexis pauline gumbs
Imani Henry
Kiyana Horton
Michele Hunter
A. Naomi Jackson
Terri Jewell
Ana-Maurine Lara
Renita Martin
Hope Massiah
Tiona McClodden
Liz Messerly
mistinguette
Lenelle Moïse
Denise Moore
Letta Neely
Ekua Omosupe
Tonya Parker
Kimberly “Q” Purnell
Almah LaVon Rice

Mattie Richardson
Brigitte Roberts
Makeda Silvera
Sheree Slaughter
Sherece Taffe
Selly k. Thiam
Karen Thompson
Nailah Tulinegwe
Hanifah Walidah
Laura Irene Wayne
Liza Wesley
Michelle Wilkinson
Arlene Williams
Shilanda Woolridge
Eva Yaa Asantewaa
Shay Youngblood
akhaji zakiya
Fiona Zedde
Kortney Ryan Ziegler

Praise for does your mama know?

“These voices are varied as are the tales they tell. Haitian, Jamerican, Afro-Canadian, biracial, Southern U.S., London by way of Barbados. Ages 14 to 90. …It is extremely rare to see a book of any kind that reflects the diversity of black people in North America, not only economically, but ethnically.”

—R. Erica Doyle, Women in the Life

“When I held this book in my hand for the first time it shook me to the core. I dreamt about it all night. Thinking, ‘if only I had had this fourteen years ago,’ because Lord knows I looked for it. If only I had known I was not the only one, what pain-filled places would I have left behind? The voices in does your mama know? share the stories of black lesbians making the proverbial ‘way out of no way,’ on the edge of self-definition. It is a catalogue of our longing, our grief, our innocence, our triumph, and, above all, our love.”

—R. Erica Doyle, Women in the Life

“…an excellent expression of tenderness and pain as womyn share their coming-out stories.”

—LaJaunessee Jordan, Outlines

“does your mama know?… does a terrific job adding a voice that’s missing from the collective gay expression. This gathering of essays, stories and poetry captures black lesbians like a prism reflects the sunlight, throwing back a thousand divergent lives. There is rich lore here for gay history, as well as black history…”

—Emma Hayes, HX for Her

“does your mama know? is a welcome addition to the history of our communities…”

—Deborah Peifer, The Bay Guardian

“Few…voices have been raised to sing the history of African American lesbians. Editor Lisa C. Moore noticed that and has set about to begin to correct the omission, and she has done a masterful job of it. …[These] are beautiful poems and stories, yes, but more than that, they are proof of our existence and show how essential it is that we have a literature of our own.”

—Dale Edwyna Smith, The Lesbian Review of Books

“Lisa C. Moore does the community a service by not censoring her anthology [does your mama know?], by allowing black lesbian voices to be heard in rich and varied ways…”

—Barbara I. Bond, Lambda Book Report

Eye to Eye: A Poetic Exercise

2009-09-11T10:13:00.001-04:00

Greetings loved ones! This is a talk that I did at the very first LGBTQ school-wide program yesterday at Bennett College (a historically black college for women in Greensboro, NC).

To watch a video of the entire program see: http://www.facebook.com/ext/share.php?sid=161321736717&h=l5jp4&u=7wLZ5&ref=mf

For the class of 2013 at Bennett College

Good morning Bennett Belles! My name is Alexis Pauline Gumbs and I am a queer black trouble maker, an afro-Caribbean grandchild and love embodied. I stand here this morning in the legacy of Audre Lorde, black feminist lesbian poet mother warrior, doing our work. I bring you an interactive embodied poetic exercise called eye to eye. Are you ready to interact? Are you awake? If you can hear me say “Audre Lorde lives!”

Thank you! This exercise is about healing. About what it means to love ourselves and to love each other as black women. Raise your hand if you have ever heard a black woman say some version of this: “I don’t really like to be around too many females. Too much drama. Women are shady. Can’t trust them. We can be associates, but I don’t really have to many female friends.” Raise your hand if you have heard a black woman or girl say that. Picture her in your mind. Close your eyes. What did she look like? How did her face look when she said that? Did she look peaceful? Resigned? Disappointed? On the verge of laughing? On the verge of telling someone off? What did she look like? Keep your eyes closed and raise your hand if you, yourself have ever said or thought something like that. “I can’t really let too many females get close to me. They talk behind your back, they try to steal your man or push up on your girl?” Keep your hand up if you have ever said or thought something like that yourself. Open your eyes, and look at me. Everything I say about black women, is true, about myself.

The other day a beloved comrade of mine told me that a young woman in a workshop he was leading about self-love and self-esteem said something to him the other day that is ridiculous enough to be funny, but is actually a logical extension of this thought about other women that many of us have had: “Love myself?” she said, with a disgusted look on her face. “Eww. That’s gay.” I laughed out loud when I heard my friend, a gay man, tell me this story. But at the end of the day, this is not a rare belief, and the costs are to cruel to be funny. We are taught so vigilantly not to love black women, we are taught, through violence and racism and sexism daily that black women are not worthy of love, we are taught that it is an amoral, disgusting thing to love a black women, and we have learned the lesson so well that we have forgotten how to love and affirm the black woman we know best. We have forgotten how to love ourselves.

I am talking about this to you because you might have the occasion to interact with a few black women over the next few years. Like everyday, all day, in class, in the dorm, in the hall, in the dining hall, in your own imagination. You have chosen brilliantly to be in a community created every day by and for black women. I am a proud graduate of a women’s college, but the power in this room, the singular majestic power of a college that is about one thing, the genius of black women, is miraculous to me. And I envy you. But that’s because I love black women. I love myself fiercely. If you are in here, surrounded by black women and you are fighting feelings of jealously, mistrust, judgement about your sisters your choice to be here at Bennett College for women is inconvenient at best. But this is also an incredible opportunity to learn how to love all different kinds of black women, and it matters that you LOVE black women, which is different than dealing with, smiling in the faces of, or tolerating other black women. The extent to which you love your sisters here at Bennett is the extent to which you can and will love yourself.

In the early 1980’s in Essence Magazine Audre Lorde, warrior poet mother icon, wrote about exactly this issue:

“We are African women and we know in our blood’s telling, the tenderness with which our foremothers held each other. It is that connection which we are seeking. We have the stories of Black women who healed each other’s wounds, raised each other’s children, fought each other’s battles, tilled each other’s earth, and eased each other’s passages into life and death. We know the possibilities of support and connection for which we all yearn and which we dream of so often. But connections between Black women are not automatic by virtue of our similarities, and the possibilities of genuine communication are not easily achieved..”

“Often we give lip service to the idea of mutual support and connection between Black women because we have not yet crossed the barriers to these possibilities, nor fully explored the angers and fears that keep us from realizing the power of a real Black sisterhood. We cannot settle for the pretenses of connection, or for parodies of self-love. We cannot continue to evade each other on the deepest level s because we fear each other’s angers, nor continue to believe that respect means never looking directly, nor with open-ness into another Black woman’s eyes. I was not meant to be alone and without you who understand.

Okay. Here comes the interactive part. What better time to interact intimately with another black woman than now. We are about to experiment with how difficult, uncomfortable and unfamiliar it feels to look directly into another black woman’s eyes. Please choose a black woman sitting near you who you do not know well, maybe someone sitting in the row in front of you or behind you. Does everybody have someone. Work it out y’all…everyone needs a partner. Someone you do not know or someone you are just getting to know.

Okay. So now look into that sisters eyes. Directly. It’s not a staring contest. You can blink, just don’t look away. Keep looking. Keep looking. Breathe. Let your eyes settle on your sister’s face. Think about how much she reminds you of yourself, think about how different she is from you. Do not look away. For 30 more seconds just chill. Look into your sister’s eye and breathe.

So how did that feel? Awkward? Strange? Did it get less or more uncomfortable for you? Were you aware that you were looking at an amazing person? Were you afraid that she was seeing the crust in your eyes from earlier this morning? How did you feel? I did this in a middle school class once and one girl whispered loudly “I think that lady’s a lesbian” which is fine, because I am a proud queer black woman and I stand here in the legacy of Audre Lorde, black lesbian genius warrior poet. But this is not some kind of gay conversion exercise. This is about learning how uncomfortable we are just looking at other black women face to face, eye to eye, and over coming that so we can really build sisterhood with each other and love ourselves. How often have you really looked any black woman in the eye for a significant period of time. That was only one minute. It felt like a lifetime because of the lifetimes we have spend avoiding each other. Have you looked in your mother’s eyes, your grandmother’s eyes, your aunts, your sister’s, your cousins?

Why not? This is what Audre Lorde said:

“We do not love ourselves, therefore we cannot love each other. Because we see in each other’s face our own face, the face we never stopped wanting. Because we survived and survival breeds desire for more self. A face we never stopped wanting at the same time as we try to obliterate it.

Why don’t we meet each other’s eyes? Do we expect betrayal in each others gaze, or recognition?”

What is dangerous about a black woman who loves black women? What is dangerous about a black woman who loves herself? What does society get from us when we are afraid to love ourselves and each other. I want us to support the students in BRIDE in really bringing out the conversation about what everyone loses in a homophobic society and to remember that homophobia in the black community isn’t really about sex. It is really about fear. How afraid are we to love each other, even as sisters, even as friends, even as students and mentors? How afraid are we to love ourselves and what are we missing?

Thank you for your bravery. Thank you for you attention this morning, thank you for looking at yourself with love and honesty, eye to eye.

BrokenBeautiful: Fall in Love All Over Again!

2009-09-08T14:29:00.001-04:00

Schools in! And your summer-lovin, nerdy quirky space for creation is exited to check out your new And you keep on keep on falling in love with the world we are making together! I know you are so ready to see what BrokenBeautiful Press is up to in this amazing season of transformation!

MobileHome Money!: Buy Lex and Julia this MobileHome for our traveling queer black intergenerational community documentation and education project! Read all about it and contribute via paypal if you can here! Also, all proceeds from the DVD and Lex's speaking circuit will go towards the sustainable media making love bug extreme!

Eternal Summer of the Black Feminist Mind EVERYWHERE!!!: Spreading the gospel of black feminist possibility and legacy by every means necessary, the Eternal Summer of the Black Feminist Mind project has a multi-media life of it's own! In addition to the in-person study group (see more details below) Eternal Summer stays portable and interactive with the new

Eternal Summer PODCAST Series with amazing music, poetry and information! Scroll down or click here to download or listen to 1979 and Meditations on the Rainbow. I just recently got word that sistas in Kenya are using the podcasts for discussion sessions. You should too!

Eternal Summer of the Black Feminist MIND TV!!!! If you have the great sense to live in Durham, North Carolina you can get black feminist goodness right in your living room on Channel 18 Monday nights at 9pm!

AND the videos!

Eternal Summer DVD of black feminist educational videos (available on a sliding scale fee for use in your community or classroom.) Paypal a donation between $11-25 to brokenbeautifulpress@gmail.com for your copy. shipping included!)

AND the Black Feminist Poet/Speaker/Workshop Leader for hire!

This year Lex is using her best developed and most cherished skill-the art of the life-changing workshop-to raise funds to support her decision to spend the next year doing the MobileHomeComing an immersive intergenerational community documentation and education project based on her lust for back queer community! (It’s weird that somehow I have to be consistent with a choice to talk about myself in the third person here, but I want to interject in the first person to say that your support means everything to me and it is evidence of the fact that it is possible to be a community supported, community accountable scholar in the 21st Century. More details here!

Queer Renaissance Film Screening/B-day Bash Fundraiser: BrokenBeautiful Press is partnering with Queer Renaissance to create the party of the fall! On Saturday September 19th in Atlanta, GA we'll be screening Julia Wallace's film "Until" two Eternal Summer of the Black Feminist Mind videos, a fashion line, music dancing, ties and more beautiful madness. For more details look at the event page here! The event is a fundraiser for intergenerational technology classes that Julia will be conducting in under-served communities in Atlanta.

Love Harder: Women of Color Working it Out

This is a reading group specifically designed for women of color in different communities to respond to the complicated matrix of oppressions that face us by loving each other even harder, with more intention, focus and specificity. We will be reading, gathering locally and posting our insights at www.loveharder.wordpress.com every season. Fall 2009 we are reading Andrea Smith’s essay about the three pillars of white supremacy. Comment on the blog or email brokenbeautifulpress@gmail.com if you want to participate!

The Summer Recap:

How amazing was our Summer!!??? Check it out!

Black Feminism Lives...ALL SUMMER LONG!

Combahee Lives!: All summer long the Combahee Survival initiative has been sparking conversation on the Quirky Black Girls discussion forums and the Combahee Survival Blog invoking the brave brilliance of the 1977 Black Lesbian Feminist Socialist Combahee River Collective with contribution and statements from contemporary movement genuises! And it don't stop! Join Quirky Black Girls or email brokenbeautiful.wordpress.com if you want to get weekly discussion prompts!

Eternal Summer Study Groups: This summer Eternal Summer of the Black Feminist mind grew wide and deep. With intimate session on Lex's porch in Durham we discussed the poetry of Audre Lorde and Nikky Finney and we kicked of the Eternal Summer Warrior film series with a documentary about Ida B. Wells (which we screened in honor of her birthday!)

Sistas in D.C., Ethiopia, Chicago, etc, have been doing local Eternal Summer sessions. Stay posted at www.blackfeministmind.wordpress.com to see what's happening near you...or better yet...gather with folks in your own community and read along!

In MAY Lex spoke at the Caribbean Studies Association meeting in Kingston Jamaica and Lex and Julia of the BrokenBeautiful Press/Queer Renaissance MobileHomecoming Collabo attended the inaugural visioning session of the Caribbean Region component of the International Research Network, a clearing house for LGBTQQI activists, artists, scholars and community organizations in the Caribbean!

In JUNE the hotness of the annual Gemini Jam (replete with Gemini juice and love message posters and the sweet sounds of DJ Superfree) popped off in Atlanta.

And THEN Lex went to the AMAZING Furious Flower Poetry Center at James Madison University in Virginia and had the honor of celebrating Lucille Clifton's birthday and her amazing body of poetry with some amazing poets and teachers (including Nikky Finney and Akasha Hull! AND in a very BrokenBeautiful way...her chosen family and community paid for her to go! Here is a link to the thank you video!

In JULY BrokenBeautiful Press was all over the Allied Media Conference in Detroit!

Shawty got Skills2Share was a space created by our beloved Cyberquilting Crew that encouraged Women of Color to learn skills from each other, from digital social networking, to quilting to video livestreaming to urban foraging.

The Cyberquilting/SPEAK/INCITE: Radical Women of Color Media Strategy Session was the jumpoff of a year of collaborativeworld changing initiatives (like the above mentioned LOVE HARDER) about to pop off in your local and cyber community!

See more pics from the AMC (taken by Moya Bailey) here!

In AUGUST the education working group of Bull City (Durham) Affiliate of Southerners on New Ground and the Queer Collective took an idea from Lex's kitchen table to the streets and created a grassroots guerilla film festival focusing on Queer People of Color in just over a week! Imagine Born in Flames, Paris is Burning and Flag Wars projected large as life on a wall in downtown Durham y'all! The fest also featured Lex's short video "So You Know" about black queer publishing!

And just now over Labor Day Weekend was the delicious delectable Queerky Black Girls Cookout in the middle of the Black Pride Exuberance!

in short...BEST SUMMER EVER!!!!!

also feel free to share amazing videos and pictures from your transformative summer. Email links and pics to brokenbeautifulpress@gmail.com and we'll post them here!

Happy to be falling in love with you all over again!

love,

lex

"Meditations on the Rainbow": Eternal Summer of the Black Feminist Mind Podcast II

2009-09-01T13:33:00.000-04:00

Filled with great music...rare and priceless poetry from Sapphire all presented in that quirky, interactive, meditative, writing workshop-esque Eternal Summer style!

(this is a photo of the brilliant Sapphire...but this time it's actually Lex reading Sapphire's juicy poetic set)

This podcast is dedicated to all of us, but especially to Tyli'a Nana Boo Mack, a black transwoman made early ancestor in a brutal act of violence in Washington DC.

Get your pen and your paintbrush and listen here:

Eternal Summer Podcast Two!!!!

(If you listen to the end you'll hear Lex singing the blues!)

*Sapphire is not a particularly PG poet so this podcast is for grown folks and the folks they can be accountable for sharing it with.

The C-Section

2009-08-30T11:17:00.001-04:00

For V.M. who gave birth to a healthy baby who the state immediately took away charging cruelty and neglect due to her choice not to have a c-section.

(words used in the post-appeal court decision confirming the ruling)

cut

clerk copy credible

custody concession

child-protective contraction

cut

critical cut

care completed

cut

colleagues conceded

consistent counsel

certify copy consent

cut

clear convincing comprehended

cut

control compliance consent

cut

conduct contends

concepts constitutional

citing crisis clothing color

caseworker cleared

claim care

cut

case confirmed

concepts committed

condone conclude confront condition

cognitive competency

college–educated consequences

confront uncontrollable combative

control care

critical cause

contemplate

continue

comprehend

continue

consider

continue

control care carefully

cut

calling counsel calling

Charchman calling

Chancery calling Christopher

calling clerk counsel colleagues

calling Coleman

calling Collier

claim credibility

claim consent

complications

class compliance

conduct control

change

consider coping

cut

culpable criminal cruelty

countervailing color conditions

clearly conflicts

childhood cancelled

cut

civil compelling

clarified concern

cooperate counsel

confirm cruelty

contact court

confront childhood

culpable civil

comprehensive cruelty

clearly conflict

central complaint

compensation cured

comments

cut

confer color

confer cruelty

confer contraditions

cut corpus

citing compelling comprehensive court-ordered complications

cut

call cruelty care

call cruelty concern

chronic court cruelty

cause crisis

call concession

cut

court-ordered

childbirth

construct cocaine connection

construct criminal corpus

construct conditions

continuously comment

considering color

cannot contemplate

cut

ii.

words nowhere/to be found

calm circle

comfort

candles

cradle

cuddle

coo

crying

celebration

cute

cereal

crib

carseat

creation

crazy constellation

complicit complacency

complete confabulation

cement confusion

cloaked co-optation

common cattle

choke crush cram choice

clinical close-mindedness

cowards cowards cowards

crooked core

corrupt crumbs

cold closure

cornered contained

cloistered caged

cord chorus

congregation cry

challenge classism

capture conscience

cry courage

cry coercion

clap choir clemency

cry capable courageous champion

crucible carrying confidence

crucial chain

cry craving

cry creation

Combahee Survival: Difficult

2009-08-26T06:26:00.004-04:00

“We have found that it is very difficult to organize around Black feminist issues, difficult even to announce in certain contexts that we are Black feminists.”-Combahee River Collective Statement, 1977

What desire, anxiety, hope and love do you feel towards fellow members of your oppressed group?

What’s a time when you could not speak your political stance out loud? What caused that? What would it take to make your vision more speakable?

ARE YOU A BLACK FEMINIST? Why? Why not?

Send us your reflections about these questions at brokenbeautifulpress@gmail.com or leave a comment here!

Bring Lex to Your Campus, Organization or Community Center!

2009-08-17T22:55:00.000-04:00

This year Alexis is using her best developed and most cherished skill-the art of the life-changing workshop-to raise funds to support her decision to spend the next year doing the MobileHomeComing an immersive intergenerational community documentation and education project based on her lust for back queer community! (It's weird that somehow I have to be consistent with a choice to talk about myself in the third person here, but I want to interject in the first person to say that your support means everything to me and it is evidence of the fact that it is possible to be a community supported, community accountable scholar in the 21st Century. :)

Bring Alexis to your campus, community center, to speak, or do a workshop that you will never forget!

at the Furious Flower Poetry Center!

Lectures:

Alexis is available to speak on a variety of topics and has tons of experiences speaking to audiences at elementary schools, college campuses, community centers, rallies, conferences and workshops. Click on the links for examples of public talks she has given in the past. She might particularly be a great person to complement your community or campus programming during Sexual Assault Awareness Month, Love Your Body Week, Celebration of Black Womanhood Week, Black Heritage Month, Women's History Month, National Coming Out Day, Mother's Day or throw tokenism to the wind and bring Alexis to speak and make any old day of the year a day filled with hope and magic!

Alexis's Academic CV

Workshops:

(Most workshops are available either as a one time session, a day-long intensive or a series within the NC Triangle or Triad areas. Get in touch about what works best for your community. Below are workshops that I have facilitated many times before. I can also design workshops specifically for your needs :)

Movement

Pressed for Knowledge: Alexis has facilitated this miraculous zine making workshop all over the United States in communities, on college campuses and at conferences. In this workshop participants (whether they are part of an existing group or are meeting for the first time on the day of the workshop) use the resources of urgency, homegrown brilliance and whatever's around to create their own publication in less than 2 hours. Alexis leads participants in a process of choosing an audience, a theme that connects their passions and a work structure and a group evaluation process for their own urgent publication! (NEW!!! Pressed for Knowledge is now available in a video version...where participants create and edit their own video in an amazingly short period of time!)

Grassroots Literary Production: Due to her experience leading the Pressed for Knowledge workshop and facilitating students at Duke University, UNC-Greensboro and the SpiritHouse Choosing Sides program in the creation of their own online and print collaborative publications, Alexis can train teachers, faculty and community cultural workers to make publication a part of their programming.

The Activist Impulse: Similar to the Pressed for Knowledge Workshop, this workshops leads participants through a process of deciding on, designing and enacting and evaluating a site-specific direct action. Alexis has led this workshop with a class of Duke University Students, at the Ethnic Studies and the Activist Impulse Symposium at Columbia University, the Beyond the Box Conference at Barnard College, the Anarchist People of Color SouthEast Regional Conference and more!

Legacy

(These workshops are grounded in Alexis's years of black feminist research and spiritual practice and are ideal for a community organization, school, department or group of people interested in how the theory, practice, poetry and lessons of black feminist practice apply to their present conditions)

Letters to Audre: developed in a special writing enrichment course that Alexis designed for Africana Women's Studies majors at Bennett College for Women, this workshop or series of workshops introduces participants to key works by black feminist lesbian poet, scholar, activist Audre Lorde. Participants create their own versions of/responses to poems and essays by Audre Lorde including Litany for Survival and The Uses of Anger. Participatns also write their own poetic letters to this literary feminist ancestor. See www.letterstoaudre.wordpress.com for examples. Alexis is also available to lead seminars for faculty, teachers, and community educators on Teaching Audre Lorde.

Letters to June: Along a similar model as the Letters to Audre Workshop, this curriculum was developed for a feminist theory course at UNC-Greensboro. Participants will write their own "Poem About My Rights" and "What's Love Got to Do With It" and also engage some of Jordan's lesser known and unpublished pieces. Alexis is also available to use her privileged access as the first researcher to view June Jordan's archival papers to lead seminars on Teaching June Jordan.

Litany for Survival: The Poetics of Community Building This writing and movement workshop, designed in collaboration with Ebony Golden starts from the grounding point of Audre Lorde's Litany for Survival and leads participants through a process of analyzing the poem for themselves, using theater of the oppressed methodologies to demonstrate what survival means for them and creating their own praise poems towards the survival of their own communities. This workshop was debuted at the Brecht Forum in New York City with an amazing response.

In Your Hands: The Depth of Legacy: based on a spiritual experience that Alexis had of recieving and writing down letters from chosen, (and uninvited!) black feminist ancestors including Fannie Lou Hamer, Nayo Watkins, Toni Cade Bambara, Octavia Butler and her own grandmother (see the letters and the video documentation of the process here) this workshop is designed to facilitate participants in listening for and to the legacies of their own chosen traditions. Alexis will facilitate a disucssion of some of the insights in the letters she recieved and each participant will leave with a plan and a way to make space for their own insights.

Sustainability

(these workshops are designed to keep community members, community organizers, students and teachers ALIVE AND WELL with full access to their love for themselves, each other and their inspired purpose!)

Habit Forming Love: This workshop shares the gifts of a 21 day process in which Alexis sought to learn how to love herself, her partner and her community better and to train herself in online video production and distribution. Available as a one time workshop or a skills building series, this workshop will allow participants to use new media technology to deepen and activate their love for themselves, their chosen family and their communities. Browse Alexis's video project here.

Mother Ourselves: Created in collaboration with Zachari Curtis for the Gumbo Yaya Sister Circle, and inspired by Audre Lorde's essay "Eye to Eye," this workshop provides participants with a safe space to examine their thoughts about the meaning of "mothering," and allows participants to explore what it might mean to nurture, teach and transform themselves. In this workshop we work in partners, listen to our bodies, use mirrors and talk about the affirming and difficult process of reflections linked to our varied experiencs with mothering.

Sustainability for Organizers and Activists: The workshop, designed for (and with) the organizers and visionaries in Critical Resistance, is about ENDING ACTIVIST BURN OUT!!!! Remembering that we, our bodies and our spirits are the most important resources for change, this workshop facilitates organizers in identifying the resources that keep them inspired and practices that can keep/get us well. Every participant leaves with their own visible reminder of their own wellness insights!

Vision

(These workshop are ideal for a community organization/project/coalition at a stage of inception or renewal.)

Dig: Grounding Community Transformation in Local Resources

Based on Alexis's poem dig, this workshop is designed to get community members in touch with the secrets, issues, and resources in their own communities and to build a shared analysis of those resources as a guide for their community projects and alliances. Each community will leave with at the very least, a group poem, new clarity about their resources and projects that connect and align their existing resources. The "dig" exercise has been enacted in Greensboro, Miami, Asheville and Gainesville as part of the Grassroots Media Justice Tour.

Wishful Thinking: Vision and Actualization Based on Alexis's poem in honor of black women and survivors of sexual violence in her community and recorded as a track on the SPEAK! CD this workshop leads participants through a meditation about their desires for their local communities and communities of affinity. Participants will leave with a community wishlist and individual affirmations. To see some of the results of the version of Wishful Thinking facilitated with the Speak Media Collective at the Women and Action in the Media Conference see www.wakeupnew.blogspot.com.

Support the Work:

(all proceeds go towards Alexis's work on the mobilehomecoming project and do not include travel and accomodation. Priority will be given to institutions in Lex's home region of the North Carolina Triangle and Triad areas.)

Lectures:

Colleges and University-$1000 for lecture or poetic performance ($2500 for a lecture or poetic performance, Q&A and an additional classroom visit)

Community Center/Non-profit- $200-300 for lecture ($500 for lecture and workshop)

Autonomous Community Spaces (independent bookstores, churches etc.)- $100 for lecture(with the possibility of just passing the hat if we can also have publications for sale)

Workshops:

( each workshop will result in a publication/poem/major accomplishment for participants to keep and for the sponsor to be proud of!):

Colleges and Universities- $1000 ($3500 for a series)

Community Center/Non-profit- $300-500 (discounts for smaller or rural orgs, talk to me) ($850-1000 for a series)

Living Rooms/Kitchen Tables- $100 or gather your people, pass the hat and have some yummy food on hand and I'm there!!! (maybe I was a travelling black feminist preacher in a past life...)

All suggested prices are really suggested. Get in touch. (brokenbeautifulpress@gmail.com)

We can work something out.

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First Ever Eternal Summer of the Black Feminist Mind PODCAST!!!!

2009-08-12T08:12:00.001-04:00

Check out this FIRST EVER PODCAST as part of the BrokenBeautiful Press educational campaign "Eternal Summer of the Black Feminist Mind." Black Feminism LIVES by every means necessary.

What does it take to survive a year like 1979?

This first podcast is about the year 1979 and how the world, and black feminism began and ended in some crucial ways that year. With the election of Ronald Reagan, the Boston Murders, the Atlanta Child Murders and the Greensboro Massacre all attacking the the lives, minds and spirits of black women 1979 was a crucial year. This podcast focuses on how Audre Lorde, Alexis DeVeaux, June Jordan and Barbara Smith reach(ed) across time and space to transform the meaning of survival. (And there is some good period appropriate and anachronistic music too!)

download to your itunes here:
http://brokenbeautiful.wordpress.com/files/2009/08/1979.m4a

Please leave comments here!

p.s. Sorry about the moments of outburst distortion. A sista is clearly super exuberantly excited about black feminism and promises to stay a little further away from the mic on podcast number two! :)

Motherful: Liberation as a Reading Practice

2009-08-04T10:45:00.006-04:00

"The Silent Revolution of the Domestic Worker" Nikki Giovanni, 1975
"Throughly Black Feminism" interview with Barbara Smith, 1983
"An Interview with Audre Lorde," Joseph Beam, 1984
It's A Family Affair: The Real Live of Black Single Mothers, Barbara Omolade, 1986 (Kitchen Table Press, Freedom Organizing Series #4)
"Adolescent Pregnancy: The Perspective of the Sisterhood of Black Single Mothers, Khadijah Matin, 1986
"A Press of Our Own: Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press" Barbara Smith, 1989
"Knowing the Danger and Going There Anyway," Cheryl Clarke, 1990
"Brother to Brother: An Interview with Essex Hemphill," 1991
The Black Back Ups, Kate Rushin, 1993
"The Fight is for Political and Economic Justice," Barbara Smith, 1998
"Transferences and Confluences: Black Poetics, the Black Arts Movement and Black Lesbian-Feminism, Cheryl Clarke, 1999
Erasure, Percival Everett, 2001
Erzulie's Skirt, Ana-Maurine Lara, 2006
The Fullness of Everything, Patricia Powell, 2009
"Reproductive Technology, Family Law, and the Postwelfare State: The California Same-Sex Parents' Rights "Victories" of 2005", Anna Marie Smith, 2009
"Race, Gender and Genetic Technologies: A New Reproductive Dystopia?" Dorothy E. Roberts, 2009

In the 1970's and 80's the Sisterhood of Black Single Mothers, an organization created by and for black single mothers, answered the media blitz, and intra-racial debates about the pathology of the "fatherless" home with a poetic question that reframed everything. Fatherless? They ask, Why not Motherful?

Brilliant brilliant brilliant. That one question is also followed up by their innovative programming and their creation of community support systems led by black single mothers, and black single fathers who were inspired by their model! Refusing to define black single mothers, regardless of age as a void, a source of darkness and the end of the world (as people sitting in congress and on war on poverty turned welfare reform boards were indeed insisting) this group of black single mothers made a poetic space for the obvious truth. Black single mother's themselves are the greatest resource for black female-led families. Only a black single mother knows what a black single mother needs. Black single mothers are experts. Act like you know America.

In a moment (right now) where CNN and Essence Magazine (ala Marry Your BabyDaddy Day!!!!) and black radio (Micheal Baisden just said the other day that "real women" need to step back and let a "real man" lead in their families. Yesterday!!! On August 4th 2009) are still selling the narrative that a black woman is incomplete without a patriarchal structure I want to raise the question again. Why not Motherful?

But actually I know why. Corporate media cannot acknowledge the fullness that single mothers, young mothers, mothers of color, co-mothers, grandmothers bring to our families because consumer capitalism is NOT HAVING IT!!! If we acknowledged that young, queer, poor, working-class, disabled, single, and racialized mothers are perfectly good at love and perfectly brilliant at supporting and sustaining life even if (or especially) they decide NOT to be bullied into a c-section by know-it-all doctors, how on earth would we get oppressed people to buy so much stuff despite their negligible disposable income? How would we get people to feel so inadequate about their their whatever"lessness" maybe it's "worthlessness" that they give up on the messy delicious sustenance of honest relationships between people and turn to the refuge of value by proxy...buying cool stuff. Because my people aren't dumb you know...and the only way you get brilliant people to act competely in opposition to their own interests is through a concerted effort to trample their self-esteem and believe that they will be loved. Why would maybeline et.al pay Essence Magazine so much for their adspace if black women were not killing themselves trying to be straight, bouncy and clean enough for some perpetual marriage without which their life means nothing?

No no no. Motherful is dangerous, like the fulness of the erotic, like "no mirrors in my nana's house," like telling little black girls that they are smart. You know...free stuff. Danger us.

And of course the state doesn't want no Motherful propaganda neither. No way. Even though it would totally save billions of dollars to support single poor and working mothers in their efforts to sustain their families instead of pathologizing them for not being able to do the impossible perfectly every second and just waiting with drool and glee to take their children away...just waiting with glee to lock their children up for childlike misjudgements, just licking its lips to the tune of fatherless....the state knows the danger of a motherful household.

What would it look like housesful of mothers, biological and chosen mothers, co-mothers, and mothers from next-door raising amazing children together. Proving the fact that marginalized, young, mothers of color can do anything together...imagine them proving that...right in front of the children. You might get a whole generation of children who are not supposed to be powerful who believe that they are. A whole set of mothers who organize to build and support education and free food and free healthcare in their communities. A whole generation of folks who realize that the state needs them more than they need it and that they are in charge. Nope. They don't want that.

Beware the motherful household.

And the certainly don't want young brothers and sisters like me and my siblings walking around proclaiming proudly that every thing we accomplish with our brazen badass brilliant selves was enabled by the fact that we were raised in a motherful household.

Nope. They don't want no Motherful propaganda.

I guess I have some t-shirts to make.

From Scratch

2009-07-27T11:21:00.005-04:00

"Juegas Todos los Dias" Pablo Neruda, 1924
Home, Leroi Jones, 1966
Bid the Vassal Soar: Interpretive Essays on the Life and Poetry of Phillis Wheatley and George Moses Horton, M. A. Richmond, 1974
"Power" Audre Lorde 1976
"Butch on the Streets, 1981" Donna Allegra, 1981
Natural Birth, Toi Derricotte, 1983
A Daughter's Geography, Ntozake Shange, 1983
Joseph Beam interviews Audre Lorde on Grenada, 1983
Joseph Beam interview Sonia Sanchez (on Grenada and other things) 1984
"Brother to Brother" Joseph Beam(multiple drafts circa 1984)
A Burst of Light, Audre Lorde 1984
"Candy Calls Star to Her" Cheryl Clarke, 1989
"Making Ourselves from Scratch" Joseph Beam 1991
"My Mother's Daughter" Ira Jefferies 1992
"Her Thighs" Dorothy Allison, 1992
"Walt Whitman: A Model Femme" Christine Cassidy, 1992
"Praisesong for the Poet" Kate Rushin 1992
"The Ethical Vegetarian" Alexis DeVeaux, 1992
"I Lost it At the Movies" Jewelle Gomez, 1994
"The Crimson Snake" Honor Moore, 1994
"Estelle" Shay Youngblood, 1995
Two or Three Things I Know for Sure, Dorothy Allison, 1995
"The Birthday Presence" Donna Allegra, 1996
Ma-ka Diasporic Juks: Contemporary Writings by Queers of African Descent, Debbie Douglas, Courtnay McFarlane, Makeda Silvera and Douglas Stewart eds, 1997
esp "A House of Difference: Audre Lorde's Legacy to Lesbian and Gay Writers" by Cheryl Clarke
In Praise of our Teachers, ed Gloria Wade-Gayles, 2003
The Ringing Ear: Black Poets Lean South, ed. Nikky Finney, 2007
Bareed Mista3jil: True Stories, 2009
Sofrito pa Ti #1, Noemi Martinez, 2009
Citrus Dreams, Noemi Martinez, 2009
Hurricane Season (multi-media performance), Climbing Poetree, now

"Y'all look like a big old birthday cake right now!" Naima from Climbing Poetree

Last night at my kitchen table I learned that a friend and comrade is having a baby!!!!!! I was so giddy with excitement I couldn't be still, properly keep serving and arranging food or arrive at anything articulate to say. What do you say in the face of the fact that life starts again. People are born. It seems like a totally unlikely thing to happen and yet it is happening all the time. No number or quality of cheerleading moves can accurately express the joy I feel at the fact that a number of the amazing, brilliant world-changing women of color I know are mothers and are becoming mothers. It truly makes me more hopefully than a truckload of Obamas.

And maybe that's the place that I'm at this week. I don't feel like I have anything particularly smart to say...I am just caught in the light of celebration. As I sat in the Manuscript Reading Room at the Schomburg Center in Harlem I was affirmed by the knowledge that the love between Audre Lorde and Joseph Beam, Joseph Beam and Barbara Smith, Ella Baker and the young women in SNCC, Cheryl Clarke and the everyday creativity of black women, Cheryl Clarke and Assata Shakur's right to freedom, Essex Hemphill and Joseph Beam, Toni Cade Bambara and the name "Joseph Fairchild Beam," Steven Fullwood and Toni Cade Bambara, Toni Cade Bambara and everyone that Cheryll Greene smiles with, Sdiane Bogus and Akasha Hull polaroids, Jacqui Alexander and sisterhood and persistance as an occasion to show up for, Audre Lorde and the project of black women learning to love each other, Joseph Beam and the radical act of the eighties, EXISTS. River transfusion. The light beam connecting spirit made evident in paper, living.

I do not come from nowhere. I come from this. So maybe it isn't so likely that people would be born. Even at 110 pounds with a full head of hair in the shrine of the Puerto Rican librarian.

:) happy birthday.

The Furious Flowering of Alexis Pauline Gumbs :)

2009-07-19T23:42:00.003-04:00

Feeling hugely grateful to my Furious Poetry Seminar Family and my given and chosen family in general for giving me back to my poet self! It means everything to me that my community and family gave me the gift the key resources: time, poetry and inspiration for my birthday this year.

Love and love and love and love.
Yours...just like this.
Always,
Alexis

grow up poet: challenging the narrative meaning of life

2009-06-25T18:27:00.008-04:00

"We grew up as poets. We grew up to be single Black mothers at war with poverty." June Jordan in a tribute to Audre Lorde

Caroling Dusk: An Anthology of Verse by Black Poets of the Twenties ed Countee Cullen (1927)
"Reflections on Little Rock" Hannah Arendt (1959)
Generations: A Memoir Lucille Clifton (1969)
"Album" Lucille Clifton (1988)
"Female" Lucille Clifton (1988)
"quilting" Lucille Clifton (1991)
Lucifer series Lucille Clifton (1991)
"The Myth and Tradition of the Black Bulldagger" SDiane A. Bogus (1991)
"Word Warrior" Jan Clausen (1993)
Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life Giorgio Agamben (1995)
"amazons" Lucille Clifton (1996)
Soul Talk: The New Spirituality of African American Women Akasha Hull (2001)
Ghosts of Slavery: A Literary Archaelogy of Black Women's Lives Jenny Sharpe (2003)
"In the Mirror" Lucille Clifton (2004)
Worrying the Line: Black Women Writers, Lineage, and Literary Tradition Cheryl Wall (2005)
State of Exception Giorgio Agamben (2005)
Souls at the Crossroads, African on the Water: The Politics of Diasporic Melancholia Sara Clarke Kaplan (2007)
"Love and Violence/Maternity and Death: Black Feminism and the Politics of Reading (Un)representability" Sara Clarke Kaplan (2007)
"Popular Sentiments and Black Women's Studies: The Scholarly and Experiential Divide" Catherine Squires (2007)
"Where's the Violence? The Promise and Perils of Teaching Women of Color Studies" Grace Chang (2007)
"Downward Residential Mobility in Structural-Cultural Context: The Case of Disadvantaged Black Mothers" Katrina Bell McDonald and Bedelia Nicola Richard (2008)
"Intersectionality Heteronormativity and Black Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender (LGBT) Families" Juan Battle and Colin Ashley (2008)
"The Black Mother Within: Notes on Feminism and the Classroom" Tiya Miles (2008)
"Lucille Clifton's Blessings and Mercies: Writing Spiritual Love as Social Power" Keith Leonard (forthcoming)

This week as part of the summer workshop for the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellows at Barnard College (affectionately known as research proposal writing bootcamp) I have been advising students on how to come up with compelling and specific research questions. "The meaning of life" I joked on Tuesday, is not a specific research question.
But in light of my response to what I've been reading recently and the miraculous success of the embodied poetic practice of the Mother Ourselves workshop on the Poetics of Community Building Ebony and I facilitated at the Brecht Forum that same day, I might need to revise that statement.

Yesterday, I told the same students (who I know I confuse way too much just by being my contradictory gemini self) that "black maternity is stolen authorship, transforming what life means on our bodies." Which has much to do with the way Hortense Spillers describes the "intervening narrative" of African American Literature as a response to the inscription of the flesh. And which also has to do with my birthday reclamation of myself as a poet at the Furious Flower poetry seminar last month. Let's hope the students pay more attention to what I do than to what I say. Because it's true, with every word choice, publication practice, community writing and research method, the meaning of life is at stake.
Which brings me to the question of form...in my dissertation chapter on survival (the revising of which brought me to most of the reading above) I talk about forms of life especially as elaborated in the theories of survival that June Jordan (HAPPY BIRTHDAY!!!!!!) and Audre Lorde offer in two very different forms: the polemic and the poem. So as I revised I read lots of poetry (especially Lucille Clifton's amazon poems which invoke Audre Lorde) a review of Lorde's Undersong that came out right after her death, some important articles from the important journal Black Women Gender and Families which touched on the language of maternity in teaching, housing, queer family dynamics and political discourse, Cheryl Wall's insightful investigation into how black women writers trouble the idea of literary lineage and Akasha Hull's cosmically crucial study on how black women writers (including Lucille Clifton, Alice Walker, Sonia Sanchez, Toni Cade Bambara and Alexis De Veaux and herself) have been building spiritual repetoires of radically transformative creative work as part of an energetic shift in what life means on the planet.

All of this reading surrounded and bolstered me for the rereading my advisors actually suggested that I do which was of famous and very much envouge european theorists Georgio Agamben and Hannah Arendt. I gloss over Agamben in the earlier version of the chapter because I am very wary of the fact that many academic readers of my work who have read Agamben and have not read Lorde and Jordan would use their own differential familiarity with Agamben's work to displace Lorde and Jordan as the primary theorists of my work. The same is possible with Arendt whose work is newly trendy again. I didn't engage Arendt in the initial version of the chapter because I can hardly believe how blatantly racist she was in her take on school integration and the ethnic studies movement in the American university. However, I want to use this space to address their work on forms of life and natality in the context of the conversation that I am accountable to...one which views black maternity as a meaningful site for an intervention into the meaning of life.

So Agamben in his work on "bare life" and "the state of exception" reminds us of the ancient western distinction between "bios" and "zoe." Bios is described as mere life, including animal life, and also as "mere reproductive life." Zoe on the other hand is distinct, political life (as put in opposition to reproductive life). In other words...Zoe is life with meaning. Arendt's concept of natality the miraculous idea that the possibility of history and action change everytime a person is born. Arendt argues that this natal possibility is only meaningful within a narrative understanding of life that has a beginning a middle and an end and where the meaning of life is unitary. This Arendt insists is what seperates us from animals (and we see how great being seperate from animals has been for the life of our planet.) The reproduction of a social world in which birth and death mean what they mean now is a requisite for the impact of birth to have the exciting significance for action potential that Arendt ascribes it in her theorization of natality. As one would imagine, but neither theorist directly admits, these distinctions come with some unspoken ideas about personhood. As we know (and indeed as the implications of Agamben's work on the camp and the limits of life suggest) life if not uniformly legible, and not all narratives give birth the same exciting potential. In fact as my chapter on maternity documents, the interconnected narratives of slave code and abortion law, and welfare policy in the United States inscribe the figure of the black mother as mere reproductive life, or more accurately, life with negative meaning. Because of the law through which the child follows the condition of the enslaved mother the black mother becomes the cipher through which children can be born into illegibility...born without any legal rights, and in the rhetoric (welfare queen) and practice (welfare reform) of welfare legislation the poor black mother is carcicatured and characterized as she who produces meaningless life, babies who are nothing more than a way to cheat the system for welfare benefits.

It is not a mere coincidence (though maybe a reproductive one) that in Arendt's analysis, the student movement was pure until it was corrupted by black students (corrupted by their dangerous and dirty black mothers) who she says introduced violence into the student movement, or that in her article arguing against school disegregation that she pathologizes parents who would dare encouarge their children to participate in the struggle for civil rights, relating that all she could think of during the attempted desegregation in Little Rock was of the absentee father who was not on the scene with his daughter who was attempting to integrate the school system..right before insisting that the federal government should not intervene in local school system...suggesting that those without visible present fathers also do not deserve the protection of the state (not to mention the right of education.) Arendt goes on to insist that the right of full choice in marriage (in this case across race) is a much more primary right than the right to equal access to education or public space or transportation, and then to chastize civil rights organizers for prioritizing those issues...when evidently access to inter-racial marriage is so much more important.

Of course we see echoes of this privileging of access to the patriarchal institution of marriage over the general rights that all people and communities deserve (healthcare, housing, immigration rights for loved ones) in the contemporay mainstream Lesbian and Gay movement's prioritization of marriage, a choice that black feminists Barbara Smith and Cheryl Clarke have critiqued exactly on the grounds that political and economic rights are the real issue, especially in queer communities of color. Anyway, I'm so angry that I am about to get off track, but the point is it seems to me that Arendt's theorization of natality and the meaning of life is consistent with the pathologization of black mothering. In fact the importance of natality...the actions and the context...the narrative through which life is understood...is the very reason that black women's claim on mothering and authority is continually criminalized IN the narrative of US law and policy. If the meaning of life is at stake, and the context of the narrative through which we have been understanding life must be preserved, no wonder black mothers are dangerous and (as Rickie Solinger teaches us) mothering is a class privilege.
If we can trouble the reproduction of the narrative of life and death in this way (think about the poetic interventions of Audre Lorde and Pat Parker who insist that their lives and their work do not start or end with their individual lives, think of M. Jaqui Alexander who reminds us about african-based spiritual practices in the diaspora that disrupt narrative unity by finding life energy, parentage, ancestors and theory in the wind and trees) this also pushes back against the division between life and life (bios and zoe) that Agamben starts with, not through the spacial exception, but though the site of reproduction. In other words if we can understand that the site of reproduction (sometimes called the black mother) IS the site of meaning-making, we have a new form of authority that might not reproduce status quo, the political narrative through which we have been mediating life.

For example, what if we grow up poets? What if (as suggested by Jordan's choice in the epigraph to this post) growing up poets and growing up single Black mothers at war with poverty and racist violence is directly related? What if we grow up refusing the discipline of beginning middle and end choosing instead the structure of resonance, echo, nuance and multiplicity? What if we refuse to channel our children into the institutional coherence and legibility of heteronormative family and marriage? What if we co-mother? What if we ancestor-worship? What if we are June Jordan and Audre Lorde and Pat Parker on consecutive rotating days? What does birth mean then? What if we steal authority, such that the mere reprodutivity of our lives means everything, instead of meaning nothing?

Hannah Arendt, Hannah Arendt. No wonder you didn't want black students to take over the University. No wonder you are horrified by watching black girls attempting to go to school. Here I am Hannah Arendt. Born again and still taking over. Hannah Arendt. it is summer semester. And I am stealing your term. Instead of the narrative natality that Arendt proposes....(I call it narrative because it insists on the need for the continutation of a pre-existing narrative for the meaningfulness of life) I intervene (we intervene) with a poetic natality that centers those criminalized practices of black mothering in the face of poverty and that threaten a western story about what life means.

Lol. Be horrified. We're back :)

lexical earthday....

2009-06-09T07:53:00.003-04:00

Oh my goodness y'all! Before the week is out I will be 27...also known as GROWN!!!!
Feel free to send wishes, love, and advice. I am thrilled about the juicy goodness of knowing you this lifetime!

Gospel: Body, Deviance and Soul

2009-05-20T07:13:00.001-04:00

Hey fam!

Check out my review of Samiya Bashir's new book of poetry from independent black gay and lesbian publishing company RedBone Press. Here is an excerpt, please read the full review and join the conversation at Blackademics.org

love,

lex

Set in the mouths of crows, on the edges of couches and dirty tables, and in the hands of the dispossessed, Bashir’s poems awaken a desire to caress the mundane, hoping your fingers will find divine crumbs of revelation. Bashir’s project, inhabiting the tradition of black gospel music’s straddling contradiction, standing in the sacred and the profane, is timely. In a moment when the question of the relationship between faith and sexuality has been put in the media limelight through the discourse of marriage amendments, this project takes a step back, redefining both sexuality and salvation with a close look at the infinite places and moments when the human body meets despair, pleasure and transcendence...

Speak Listening Party in Brooklyn! Be there!

2009-05-15T11:53:00.002-04:00

Fortunately Possible: A Reminder to Myself About Why I'm Doing This

2009-05-09T11:03:00.003-04:00

“These stories raise complex questions about the mediating role of gender categories in racial politics and in particular about the psychological structures of identification facilitated by the idea of maternity. It is impossible to explore these important matters here.” -Paul Gilroy in The Black Atlantic

“Unfortunately, even in scholarship whose specific goal is to sketch a “Black Atlantic” imaginary, there is little attempt to consider not just the way black women travel, but more important, the ways the ideological uses and abuses of gender always undergird any articulation of diaspora-the ways evocations of black populations elsewhere are always shaped by the representation of reproduction.” Brent Edwards in The Practice of Diaspora

Forget Hallmark: Why Mother's Day is a Queer Black Left Feminist Thing

2009-05-07T06:43:00.004-04:00

The Anti-Social Family by Michele Barrett and Mary McIntosh (1982)
Fear of a Queer Planet ed. Micheal Warner (1999)
Aberrations in Black: Towards a Queer of Color Critique by Roderick Ferguson (2004)
"Of Our Normative Strivings: African American Studies and the Histories of Sexuality" by Roderick Ferguson (2005)
"Queerness as Horizon: Utopian Hermeneutics in the Face of Gay Pragmatism" by Jose E. Munoz (2007)
"A 'New Freedom Movement of Negro Women': Sojourning for Truth, Justice, and Human Rights during the Early Cold War" by Erik S. McDuffie (2008)
Blood Dazzler by Patricia Smith (2008)
Something Like Beautiful: One Single Mother's Story by Asha Bandele (2009)*

My mother is black. So the means through which I was produced is a matter of national instability. My mother is black. So the trace of slavery waits every moment to ink my body with meaninglessness. My mother is black. So my living is a question of whether or not racism will be reproduced today. My mother is black. This same piece of information threatens my survival. But my mother is black, which is at the same time the only thing that makes my survival possible.

It's early morning. I am a little bit drunk on the sound of rain, but it occurs to me that I should get (you) ready for mother's day. It is very easy to notice that I am obsessed with mothering and mothers. Mother is the single most interesting and confusing word that I know. Next to black.

And here comes mother's day. For me this year mother's day means a million things. Expectancy, fear, obligation, inspiration, joy, admiration, deep reflection. A few weeks ago my mother told me that she thinks I will be such a great mother. It struck me that while I have always dreamed of becoming a mother, and intended to become a mother, it always comes as a surprise when anyone affirms that it is something that I can do, SHOULD do even. Because I live in a culture that criminalizes black mothers for creating and loving black children, a culture that criminalizes black kids for being born. And latino kids too. I have been taught that mothering is something that happens to you, and you deal with it, and fight for it, swallowing down shame and living with the threat that the state wants nothing more than to take your kids away from you in every way imaginable.

But it is not my mother who taught me that. My mother repeats again and again that mothering us is her greatest accomplishment, like asha her enduring joy and triumph despite everything. And trust, she has other great accomplishments. My mother, not through perfection, not through ease, but through sincere struggle, intense and even sometimes overwhelming love taught us something in her very being. My sister (now an ambitious account exec in New York) once confessed to me that though it might seem unfeminist the only thing she really cared about, the one thing that she knew she wanted to do for sure was to be a good mother. And I told her what I more recently wrote in a poem to one of my feminist theory students, who blessed up by bringing her daughter to class, "mothering is the most feminist act of all." My mother, like every black mother, has been slandered. But we know a lie when we see it. My brother wanted to punch every producer of CNN's disgusting "Black in America" series for daring to suggest that being raised by a black mother was the key liability destroying the life chances of black people. How dare they? How dare they? When our black mother is the only reason we know how to breathe and survive despite the toxic racism filling this world. How dare they?

It is no mystery why it is a cultural truth that talking about a black person's mother is a great way to unleash a universe of anger. Our mothers are slandered every single second of every single day. The media does it like it's it's job. And indeed it is.

And here is the risk. All this talk of mothering, all this affirmation and priviliging of mothering puts me at risk, not only in a mainstream narrative working to reproduce a nation built on racial hate and genocide, but also on the academic queer left. It is not very queer of me to keep talking about my mother this way. In fact (as Micheal Warner suggests) the only queer way for a black person to talk about a mother is the "irony" of the house mother in black gay ball culture. CNN is dead to me. The deeper betrayal is that queer studies participates in the slander of the black mother, agreeing with the story that says she should not exist.

Has Warner not considered (as Cathy Cohen makes very clear in Punks, Bulldaggers and Welfare Queens) that black mothering is already a queer thing? Because we were never meant to survive. So the Queen Mother in the house movement is not just throwing shade, the queen is doing the necessary work of mothering. Of saying these bodies black and queer almost to redundancy, these spirits that every facet of our society would seek to destroy, MUST survive and WILL transform the meaning of life whether you like it or not. That is what a black mother does. Sincerely. It is no joke.

So this week I have been picking a bone with a queer theory narrative that sees mothering as the least radical thing one can do, in so much that it becomes irrelevant to the majority of the discourse on queerness. Clearly, like Moynihan, they don't know my mother. Asserting that the labor of mothering is always in collaboration with the reproductive narrative that reproduces heteronormativity ignores the fact there has been a national consensus for centuries that black people should not be able to mother and every force, from coercive sterlization, to workfare has been mobilized to try to keep them from doing it. Where has the dominant (read white) queer theory been while politicians have been ranting and raving about how welfare queens, (which despite the actual statistics becomes a code name for poor and racialized mothers) are going to destroy civilization as we know it by not only creating black surplus children, but by influencing these children with their deviant and risky and scary behavior? And isn't this the organizing desire of queer theory....to destroy civilization as we know it?

I just wish everyone would listen to Cathy Cohen (who by the way is a black co-mother to a beautiful fierce black girl-child) so I wouldn't have to stand here screaming (or more accurately sit here taking deconstructing and rebuilding the premises of queer theory all week long). But here is the quick and dirty of it...mainstream queer theory as inaugurated by Warner's edited volume and influenced by a Marxist feminst tradition of critiquing the heteropatriarchal family as a complicit force in the reproduction of capitalist oppression throw the black babies out with the bathwater of their universalism. The "tyranny of motherhood" as described by Barrett and McIntosh does not leave room for those other deployments of "mother" and "hood" (excuse me "inner-city") in the American vernacular of culture of poverty discourse.

This is why Hortense Spillers should be required and repeated reading for queer theorists. Four words. Mama's Baby Papa's Maybe. Which means there is no reason that the act of mothering would reproduce patriarchy, or even take place within the confines of patriarchy along normative lines because the practice of American slavery has so fundamentally ripped the work of mothering from the bodies of black mothers (forcing them to do the labor of mothering for white and black children while fully denying them any of the authority of motherhood by killing and selling away and raping and mutilating their children. (I have posted here before about my discovery, while reading slave code, that even a free black mother had no legal right to defend an enslaved daughter from abuse by a slave master.)

The complexity of the term mother (next to black) requires a queer theory that deuniversalizes race and highlights the function of racism in reproducing the heteropatriarcal status quo. Cathy Cohen, Roderick Ferguson and Jose Munoz do this work of reminding us that Third World Feminism and the Third World Gay Liberation movement are an alternative starting point (contemporary with the Marxist feminist arguments that Warner's version of queer theory inherits). Their work is crucial because it says something very obvious. We are people of color. The whole system wake up every day trying to exterminate our bodies and our spirits. Our very survival is queer.

We were never meant to survive, and if mothers are part of why we are here (and they are), then they are the queerest of us all. But this is not even news. If we remember what black women have been up to in the United States we can just go ahead and let go of the asumption that mothering is conservative or that conserving and nurturing the lives of black children has ever had any validated place in the official American political spectrum.

Eslanda Robeson
Charlotta Bass
Shirley Graham Du Bois
Mary Church Terell
Maude White Katz

Take the fierce black women writers, mothers, publishers, actresses, activists
who would become the Sojourners for Truth and Justice and their work starting in the 1940's to protest the imprisonment of Rosa Lee Ingram a black mother who was sentenced to death for standing up for herself, and defending herself against a white man who tried to rape her. It was black women activists who changed her sentence to life in prison and then eventually (after 12 years incarceration) got her released from prison. And always always the key word in their organizing strategy was "mother." Their key understanding of Ingram who was willing to fight to keep this violent man away from her body and away from her children epitomized the term "mother" for this set of black woman revolutionaries. They framed the state's violence against Ingram as a violence against black mothering itself. How dare this black woman take a stance against rape. Standing against rape is a mothering act. How dare she threaten the perceived truth about what happens to black people, that black bodies are infinitely rapeable. How dare she stand ferocious, daring and teaching. This is what will happen to you if you come at me. This is the act of mothering that mobilized a national movement, black women gathered twenty-five thousands signatures for a petition in 1949...way before the era of the text message e-blast petition. They made it an international human rights issue, contacting every single member nation of the UN. And I need you to know this, remember this if you remember nothing else:

On Mother's Day, exactly 60 years ago the black left internationalist feminists of Ingram Committee sent TEN THOUSAND MOTHER'S DAY CARDS to the White House and scared Harry S. Truman so bad that he made up an excuse to miss their scheduled meeting the next day.

Ten thousand mother's day cards from black women to the white house. Stolen holiday. No justice, no peace in the form of ten thousand paper-cuts. A floral dare saying: celebrate this. This is what mothering means: organized support for radical self-defense. A complete refusal of rape by any means necessary. Ten thousand Mother's Day cards. A threat saying we are black mothers. We are survivors. Try us.

Forget hallmark.

Have a revolutionary Mother's Day people.

*(Outside of the above timeline, sit Cathy Cohen's "Punks, Bulldaggers and Welfare Queens" and Hortense Spillers's "Mama's Baby Papa's Maybe" which i did not reread this week...but have completely internalized such that I should be understood to be citing them no matter what I am saying about anything.-apg)

BrokenBeautiful Blooming!: The Spring Update

2009-05-04T07:24:00.001-04:00

It's Spring!!! That bright, sexy season when we remember the full color of the world and everything becomes possible again! So what better way to celebrate the rebirth of the planet than to break your beautiful spirit out of its shell?

BrokenBeautiful Press (www.brokenbeautiful.wordpress.com) is ready for your reawakening with exciting new projects for you to check out, participate in and support.

On the move:

a queer black mobilehomecoming

BrokenBeautiful Press is partnering with Queer Renaissance to embark on a monumental journey in celebration of the bravery and genuis of the trailblazers of the black queer/lesbian/gender-non-conforming community. Think "black lesbian Eyes on the Prize" y'all! A year from today Alexis and Julia will be getting in an environmentally sustainable RV and hitting the road to learn, document and transmit the legacies of brave black queer warriors who have been transforming the meaning of life since the 1980's or earlier and hosting amazing intergenerational community education events all over the US. To find out more and to offer resources, advice or financial support go to: www.mobilehomecoming.wordpress.com

SPEAK!: Support Radical Mamis of Color!
BrokenBeautiful Press is proud to celebrate the birth of the most radical spoken word CD ever. Think This Bridge Called My Back in audio form! Speak Media Collective, a group of radical women of color transforming the world through new media, has launched a self-titled spoken word CD as a grassroots fundraiser to support the participation of young mothers of color in the Allied Media Conference. Help moms and kids of color travel to this national media gathering and get your mind blown at the same time. The CD includes a zine and a curriculum guide for using the CD in your community and classroom. To get your copy go to www.speakmediacollective.com

Community Education:
Combahee Survival: A Movement Revival:
In 1977 a crew of radical black socialist lesbian feminists wrote a document that changed the landscape of social justice forever. More than 30 years later young black feminists are tracking the survival of the analysis of interlocking oppressions and holistic transformation that the members of the Combahee River Collective stood for in the progressive community at large. The Combahee Survival Project is a dispersed community education project that shines light on and nurtures the seeds of a radical intersectional approach all over our social justice movement. Go to www.combaheesurvival.wordpress.com to see poetic activities that draw on the words of the original statement, examples from community organizers who are still wrestling with the issues the collective raised and worksheets to use in your community, and look out for the Survival/Revival activity of the week brought to you by BrokenBeautiful Press all summer long!

Eternal Summer of the Black Feminist Mind
In Durham, North Carolina (aka vanguard city, center of the universe) a growing, diverse and beautiful group of folks have gathered in the name of black feminism. With delicious potlucks to discuss key essays by black feminists, fieldtrips to hear black feminist poetry, and more we are acting on our faith that the radical work of visionaries like Claudia Jones, Angela Davis, June Jordan can inform and transform our city and our lives. And like-minded devotees in Chicago, DC and other cities have joined in. Follow along, find out about upcoming events and download free reading material at www.blackfeministmind.wordpress.com

Interact!!!!!

Habit Forming Love: The Video Project:
They say it takes 21 days to form a habit, so your girl Alexis decided to cultivate the habit of loving herself and her people (you!) fully, bravely, loudly and proudly. What better habit could there be? Experimenting with (and teaching herself) the art of internet video production and sharing she created videos of love for self, love in community and growing love for her sweetheart. Now it's your turn! Go to www.habitforminglove.wordpress.com
to browse Lex's videos and make your own!

In Your Hands: Letters from Ancestors
Alexis started the year with a life-changing, spirit-humbling process of receiving letters from black feminist ancestors who gave loving advice, welcome reminders and sometimes difficult challenges and lessons. Read letters from Audre Lorde, Octavia Butler, Lydia May Gumbs (lex's grandma), Toni Cade Bambara and more at www.motherourselves.wordpress.com and add your own letters about your communication with your chosen and familial ancestors.

It's Spring! Anything is possible, even you and the life-changing love that makes your spirit tingle and grow.

Stay fly!
love always,
BrokenBeautiful Press
brokenbeautifulpress@gmail.com

littleblackbook

Be Bold Be Re(a)d: The Podcast

Eternal Summer of the Black Feminist Mind Presents: Pauli Murray

Save the Date! Lex speaking @ Rutgers

Atlanta Loved Ones!: Come Hear Me Talk with Gloria Steinem and Beverly Guy Sheftall

Your Mother: June Jordan and the Orchestration of Anger

poetics of anger: june jordan's letters to the editor

Buried Treasure

Oh My Gosh! Being in this book is a dream come true!

buy this book!!!!!

RedBone Press

does your mama know?

(revised edition) edited by Lisa C. Moore

Contributors

Praise for does your mama know?

Eye to Eye: A Poetic Exercise

BrokenBeautiful: Fall in Love All Over Again!

The Summer Recap:

"Meditations on the Rainbow": Eternal Summer of the Black Feminist Mind Podcast II

The C-Section

Combahee Survival: Difficult

Bring Lex to Your Campus, Organization or Community Center!

Lectures:

Alexis's Academic CV

Workshops:

Movement

Legacy

Sustainability

Vision

Support the Work:

First Ever Eternal Summer of the Black Feminist Mind PODCAST!!!!

Motherful: Liberation as a Reading Practice

From Scratch

The Furious Flowering of Alexis Pauline Gumbs :)

grow up poet: challenging the narrative meaning of life

lexical earthday....

Gospel: Body, Deviance and Soul

Speak Listening Party in Brooklyn! Be there!

Fortunately Possible: A Reminder to Myself About Why I'm Doing This

Forget Hallmark: Why Mother's Day is a Queer Black Left Feminist Thing

BrokenBeautiful Blooming!: The Spring Update

(revised edition)
edited by Lisa C. Moore