my rage is inarticulate today. i cannot believe this is happening again, not because it is not predictable, but because the Israeli state's insistence on perpetuating genocide in my generation threatens my belief in humanity. i take this personally.
i am grateful that i hold someone in my heart whose rage is articulate.
i ask that as we hold everyone in Gaza in our hearts we remember this poem by June Jordan:
Apologies to All the People in Lebanon
Dedicated to the 60,000 Palestinian men, women and children who lived in Lebanon from 1948-1983
I didn't know and nobody told me and what
could I do or say, anyway?
They said you shot the London Ambassador
and when that wasn't true
they said so
what
They said you shelled their northern villages
and when U.N. forces reported that was not ture
because your side of the cease-fire was holding
since more than a year before
they said so
what
They said they wanted simply to carve
a 25 mile buffer zone and then
they ravaged your
water supplies your electricity your
hospitals your schools your highways and byways all
the way north to Beirut because they said this
was their quest for peace
They blew up your homes and demolished the grocery
stores and blocked the Red Cross and took away doctors
to jail and they cluster-bombed girls and boys
whose bodies
swelled purple and black into twice the original size
and tore the buttocks from a four month old baby
and then
they said this was brilliant
military accomplishment and this was done
they said in the name of self-defense they said
that is the noblest concept
of mankind isn't that obvious?
They said something about never again and then
they made close to on million human beings homeless
in less than three weeks and they killed or maimed
40,000 of your men and your women and your children
But I didn't know and nobody told me and what
could I do or say, anyway?
They said they were victims. They said you were
Arabs.
They called your apartments and gardens guerilla
strongholds.
They called the screaming devastation
that they created the rubble.
Then they told you to leave, didn't they?
Didn't you read the leaflets that they dropped
from their hotshot fighter jets?
They told you to go.
One hundred and thirty-five thousand
Palestinians in Beirut and why
didn't you take the hint?
Go!
There was Mediterranean: You
could walk into the water and stay
there.
What was the problem?
I didn't know and noboby told me and what
could I do or say, anyway?
Yes, I did know it was the money I earned as a poet that
paid
for the bombs and the planes and the tanks
that they used to massacre your family
But I am not an evil person
The people of my country aren't so bad
You can expect but so much
from those of us who have to pay taxes and watch
American TV
You see my point;
I'm sorry.
I really am sorry.
***********************************************************************************
Throughout her career June Jordan was punished by the US publishing establishment for her refusal to be silent about Isreali aggression against Palestinians and the anti-Arab dehumanization that characterized US foreign engagement with the Middle East. People said she was alienating herself by taking this issue so personally.
I take it personally.
Modelling the form of transnational feminist solidarity that we must aspire towards, June Jordan famously said "I was born a black woman, but now am become Palestinian."
I take it personally that CNN says that Isreal is at war with Hamas, both because it uses the name of an organization to obscure the fact that this attack is launched against the Palestinian people. CNN, like the Israeli state, refuses again and again to even admit that there is such a people as the Palestinian people, that there is such a place as occupied Palestine. This is how genocide works, and I take it personally. I take it personally that in this age a "war" is no longer defined as a military engagement between two nation-states, that we can use the word "war" to describe what an occupying force, in the form of an apartheid state does to the people it has captured in a concentration camp. I am outraged that the only thing we can call for is a cease-fire, as if there is balance. As if these two entities have ever been equal. As if the United States has not been sending most of it's (our) international aid to buy weapons and build walls for the aggressor, the Israeli State. As if the more than 300 Palestinian people killed were equal to the one Israeli person caught by a missile that Hamas launched AFTER 30 missiles hit Gaza.
Would our strategy be to ask for a cease fire between the MOVE organization and the Philadelphia police? Would our strategy be to ask for a cease fire between the Black Panther Party and co-intel pro. "Cease-fire" is a belated and non-sensical term when the resources, the forms of weapons, have already been alloted so disproportionately.
I have a slingshot. When they come for me with a tank will you ask for a cease-fire, ask both sides to calm down?
I am taking this personally. I am not going to calm down.
All you have to do is remember that Palestinians are people like any other people, full of love and hope and beauty and brilliance who can be hurt, even while surviving occupation, racism, attacks against every one of their institutions and the unjust loss over and over again of the lives of their loved ones, of the homes of their skins, of the disrespect of being called out of your name and exiled in your own land again and again. All you have to do it remember that Palestinians are people and the absurdity and tragedy of this situation will fall on your heart and crush it, like mind is crushed today.
But the mass media is asking you to forget, with every word choice transmitted over here about what is going on in occupied Palestine right now. Asking you to forget that simple truth that even without a state (i would say ESPECIALLY without a state) people are people: full of love and priceless.
June Jordan's incisive repetition of "They said/they said so/what" in her poem is an illustration of what we are still being told today. The words of the Israeli state get credit (like the massive amounts of weapon-buying aid that we send them...on credit that they will never have to repay) and when their weak arguments for self defense against a group of people that they have forced into a cage prove to be lies, our media turns away.
All we have to do it to remember that there is no justification for genocide and we will see clearly what justice is. But our media is asking us to forget. Our 60th Anniversary of the State of Israel attending President and our "hail the great state of Israel" President-elect are asking us to forget.
Do not forget.
Monday, December 29, 2008
Sunday, December 28, 2008
Eternal Summer of the Black Feminist Mind!
Due to the huge and affirming response to BrokenBeautiful Press's Summer of Our Lorde we are THRILLED to present the Eternal Summer of the Black Feminist Mind, a portable progressive series based in Durham North Carolina in partnership with SpiritHouse, Southerners on New Ground, UBUNTU, the Land and Sustainability Working Group, Kindred Healing Justice Collective and more.
In 1977 the Combahee River Collective wrote a key black feminist manifesta groundbreaking in it’s assertion that the “major systems of oppression are interlocking. You are invited to the first session on the groundbreaking black feminist document The Combahee River Collective Statement. Download it at www.blackfeministmind.wordpress.com
and check out some radical exercises at www.combaheesurvival.wordpress.com
In Durham we'll be discussing it on January 7th. Email brokenbeautifulpress@gmail.com for details and feel free to read along wherever you are and comment here!
See you (t)here!!!!!
Thursday, December 18, 2008
Monday, November 10, 2008
Mere Relative: Audre Lorde, Grenada and the Ethics of Diasporic Solidarity
Greetings loved ones!
This is a paper that I presented (next to my beloved sister Zachari Curtis!) on a panel called "Radical Black Feminist Literatures" at North Carolina Central University's conference on "New Approaches to African Diaspora Studies." It is important for me to note that there were a WIDE range of definitions of diaspora in room...some more nostalgic, narrow and patriarchal than others. This is the seed of an upcoming chapter called "Diasporic Reports" so feedback is much appreciated!
love,
lex
Mere Relative: Audre Lorde, Grenada and the Ethics of Diasporic Solidarity
“Grenada is their country. I am only a relative.”
“To the average Grenadian, the United States is a large but dim presence
where some dear relative now lives.”
-Audre Lorde “Grenada: an Interim Report”
What kind of intimacy do I want to create here? Who do I imagine you to be anyway? Who would you have to be to understand what I am compelled to say here? Maybe you are black, because we are convened at an historically black institution. Maybe you know something about dispossession, and segregation and how the spaces you think you own are really part of something big and uncaring, like the state. Or an economy where black already means something that we didn’t consent to. Maybe you will understand, because you came here to talk about the African diaspora. Maybe you consider me your people. I pray to the Lorde of my choosing (Audre Lorde), that I am your people somehow, that my presence grows a space in your heart beyond understanding for love. But there is no one you can be that will guarantee that I make sense to you today. What kind of intimacy do we need? What kind of distance are we afraid of?
Can I be honest with you? I came here today seeking home. Six months ago I went Grenada seeking the same thing. And I found it in a way. The generous attention in your faces. The small island plants, smell of sea wind of embrace that felt familiar for a girl grown and summered on a different small island with a different economy. Does that make me sentimental? Audre Lorde, a black feminist lesbian warrior mother poet teacher born in Harlem says:
“The first time I came to Grenada I came seeking “home,” for this was my mother’s birthplace and she had always defined it so for me.” I will always believe that Audre Lorde was and is a woman and a spirit of rare brilliance, bravery, eloquence and insight. But this is a typical statement for a US born black person with Caribbean parents. Home for an Afro-Caribbean family, is not the United States of America. The harder lesson to embrace is that no where else is home either. This is about the double diaspora. Afro-diasporic people dispersed again by the market, out of the Caribbean and into the United States, or Canada, or Europe. Carrying the traces of colonialism and neocolonialism in over stuffed bags. And that’s not the heaviest baggage. Audre Lorde went to Grenada seeking home. But she could not find it. First, because of the cruelty of space and time, the stories her parents raised her with about Grenada were inevitably dated and referred to a place that no longer existed, and that place, overwritten with longing, may have never existed except in their memories. And on her second visit Grenada could not be home, could not be properly claimed by any black person because of the 1983 United States invasion into what was the first black socialist republic. Home, a place controlled by black people that refuses capitalism (or maybe that’s only MY definition of home) is a dream place, to dangerous to exist. As Lorde says: “What a bad example, a dangerous precedent, an independent Grenada would be for the peoples of Color in the caribbean, in Central America, for those of us here in the United States.” But that doesn’t mean what Audre Lorde found in Grenada, what I found years later was not familiar.
Grenada though not home, was familiar, because the US invasion of Grenada was justified by a logic that black people living in the US knew all too well. Lorde explains that racism is the primary export from the United States to the world. Here is her inventory: “The lynching of Black youth and shooting down of Black women, 60 percent of Black teenagers unemployed and rapidly becoming unemployable, the presidential dismantling of the Civil Rights Commission, and more Black families below the poverty line than twenty years ago—if these facts of American life can be passed over as unremarkable, then why not the rape and annexation of tiny Black Grenada?” Familiar, but not home.
Diaspora is not what I wish it was. Home in every black face and every majority black space on the planet. A fabulous circle of homegirls holding hands across continents, a way for me to look at you and know you know what I mean. Diaspora is not what I wish it was a strain that lets me trace my presence backwards across centuries like a fated journey an inevitable victory. Diaspora is not what I wish it was, but I am connected to you somehow. We are, despite it all, related.
And let me pause here before and inside of your affirmation to tell you what I do not mean. I do not consent to the definition of diaspora that says the African diaspora is sperm trailing across time from a far away mother land to a group of linked children. It’s not what you wish it was. Diaspora is not some true race legacy for us to hold on to. A story for the fatherless that tells us who and where and what and why our fathers are. Diaspora is not that. Diaspora is what makes that impossible. I do not consent to a fairy tale that leaves me in chains and then pretends those chains are not there. Diaspora is not Marcus Garvery reborn 50 times out of the womb of any black woman as long as she is black enough. You mean it well, but I’m not with that. As Brent Edwards reminds us, there is a difference between pan-africanism and diaspora. Who do you have to be to understand what I am trying to say here? Maybe you are black. Which could mean your mother was black, your children are gonna be black, which could have led you to believe, understandably that race is something we reproduce with our bodies. You know, over time, diaspora.
I am here to tell you (in the name of the Lorde no less), no. We do not reproduce race with our bodies. The only thing our bodies make is love. The only thing that rightfully lives in our skin is life’s longing for itself. The only thing that our bodies know how to make untaught is love and more love and more love. Because love is the only thing we need. If there was a contents label on my body it would say this person is made of some certain amount of water, which is another name for love, and a certain amount of cells remaking themselves, love. Love is the only thing I have, the only thing I have the RIGHT to make. And that’s what I’m doing here. And because I love you, I am going to be as honest as I can be.
Race is not something we make with our bodies. Race is merely something we survive. Only racism can make and remake race over time. And racism is a story about who can be killed. But that story, does connect us. So black people in the United States, Audre Lorde argues, in an urgent interim report that she stopped the presses on her own book to include...black people in the United States are related to black people in Grenada. But not because of our melanin or the blood in our veins, but because of racism, our killability, we are related by the blood that spills out. Black people in the United States are related to black people in Grenada because the United States is using the story of racism to steal power from all of us. Black people everywhere are related. Kind of like family. You know a group of people you are stuck with for better or for worse, tied to by law and survival, and that doesn’t mean there is love there, but there could be.
Audre Lorde models the practice of how we can relate to our dear relative, our mere relatives, our not very near relatives with love. And the first requirement is that we are honest about the fact that we are not all the same. Black people in the United States paid taxes that funded a military invasion into Grenada, and it was of course, disproportionately black people in that army through which the US invaded Grenada killing the young revolutionaries and imposing an economic situation that among other things caused people living in an island full of trees that produced cocoa beans to IMPORT chocolate. My uncle, who was in the Army at that time wanted so bad to go to Grenada, years and many books later he is glad he didn’t get his wish. But directly or indirectly the same imperialist racism that makes black people in the United States related to black people everywhere, consistenly puts us on opposite sides, of a very dirty coin. As blacks in the US we consent over and over again to violence against other black people done in our name, and usually without our knowledge. Not a very brotherly situation at all.
Audre Lorde is saying, as a mere relative, that it doesn’t have to be that way. We are related through racist systems that we do not control, but we can only look each other in the eye, with love, if we acknowledge our different relationships of power. Who does it benefit when my own oppression here overshadows my privilege in relationship to the people living in places that this country has invaded through the racist ideology of the war on terror. Does diaspora now mean that I am related to Iraqis to everyone in Guantanamo through systems of racism. And if so, how can I be related to those who racism oppresses through intentional solidarity, the practice of love? What kind of intimacy am I trying to create here? I think as we innovate in our study and practice of black diaspora our key concern needs to be the terms under which we are related and the ways the and privileges that our different relationships to power and access make us accountable. Diaspora, I would argue must compel us towards what Jacqui Alexander and Chandra Mohanty would call a democratic transnationalism, where not only our skinfolks become our kinfolks, but where we are accountable to everyone oppressed by racism with a strategic solidarity that acknowledges the systems through which we meet each other. Familiar, and struggling, mere relatives, until we can meet, at home.
This is a paper that I presented (next to my beloved sister Zachari Curtis!) on a panel called "Radical Black Feminist Literatures" at North Carolina Central University's conference on "New Approaches to African Diaspora Studies." It is important for me to note that there were a WIDE range of definitions of diaspora in room...some more nostalgic, narrow and patriarchal than others. This is the seed of an upcoming chapter called "Diasporic Reports" so feedback is much appreciated!
love,
lex
Mere Relative: Audre Lorde, Grenada and the Ethics of Diasporic Solidarity
“Grenada is their country. I am only a relative.”
“To the average Grenadian, the United States is a large but dim presence
where some dear relative now lives.”
-Audre Lorde “Grenada: an Interim Report”
What kind of intimacy do I want to create here? Who do I imagine you to be anyway? Who would you have to be to understand what I am compelled to say here? Maybe you are black, because we are convened at an historically black institution. Maybe you know something about dispossession, and segregation and how the spaces you think you own are really part of something big and uncaring, like the state. Or an economy where black already means something that we didn’t consent to. Maybe you will understand, because you came here to talk about the African diaspora. Maybe you consider me your people. I pray to the Lorde of my choosing (Audre Lorde), that I am your people somehow, that my presence grows a space in your heart beyond understanding for love. But there is no one you can be that will guarantee that I make sense to you today. What kind of intimacy do we need? What kind of distance are we afraid of?
Can I be honest with you? I came here today seeking home. Six months ago I went Grenada seeking the same thing. And I found it in a way. The generous attention in your faces. The small island plants, smell of sea wind of embrace that felt familiar for a girl grown and summered on a different small island with a different economy. Does that make me sentimental? Audre Lorde, a black feminist lesbian warrior mother poet teacher born in Harlem says:
“The first time I came to Grenada I came seeking “home,” for this was my mother’s birthplace and she had always defined it so for me.” I will always believe that Audre Lorde was and is a woman and a spirit of rare brilliance, bravery, eloquence and insight. But this is a typical statement for a US born black person with Caribbean parents. Home for an Afro-Caribbean family, is not the United States of America. The harder lesson to embrace is that no where else is home either. This is about the double diaspora. Afro-diasporic people dispersed again by the market, out of the Caribbean and into the United States, or Canada, or Europe. Carrying the traces of colonialism and neocolonialism in over stuffed bags. And that’s not the heaviest baggage. Audre Lorde went to Grenada seeking home. But she could not find it. First, because of the cruelty of space and time, the stories her parents raised her with about Grenada were inevitably dated and referred to a place that no longer existed, and that place, overwritten with longing, may have never existed except in their memories. And on her second visit Grenada could not be home, could not be properly claimed by any black person because of the 1983 United States invasion into what was the first black socialist republic. Home, a place controlled by black people that refuses capitalism (or maybe that’s only MY definition of home) is a dream place, to dangerous to exist. As Lorde says: “What a bad example, a dangerous precedent, an independent Grenada would be for the peoples of Color in the caribbean, in Central America, for those of us here in the United States.” But that doesn’t mean what Audre Lorde found in Grenada, what I found years later was not familiar.
Grenada though not home, was familiar, because the US invasion of Grenada was justified by a logic that black people living in the US knew all too well. Lorde explains that racism is the primary export from the United States to the world. Here is her inventory: “The lynching of Black youth and shooting down of Black women, 60 percent of Black teenagers unemployed and rapidly becoming unemployable, the presidential dismantling of the Civil Rights Commission, and more Black families below the poverty line than twenty years ago—if these facts of American life can be passed over as unremarkable, then why not the rape and annexation of tiny Black Grenada?” Familiar, but not home.
Diaspora is not what I wish it was. Home in every black face and every majority black space on the planet. A fabulous circle of homegirls holding hands across continents, a way for me to look at you and know you know what I mean. Diaspora is not what I wish it was a strain that lets me trace my presence backwards across centuries like a fated journey an inevitable victory. Diaspora is not what I wish it was, but I am connected to you somehow. We are, despite it all, related.
And let me pause here before and inside of your affirmation to tell you what I do not mean. I do not consent to the definition of diaspora that says the African diaspora is sperm trailing across time from a far away mother land to a group of linked children. It’s not what you wish it was. Diaspora is not some true race legacy for us to hold on to. A story for the fatherless that tells us who and where and what and why our fathers are. Diaspora is not that. Diaspora is what makes that impossible. I do not consent to a fairy tale that leaves me in chains and then pretends those chains are not there. Diaspora is not Marcus Garvery reborn 50 times out of the womb of any black woman as long as she is black enough. You mean it well, but I’m not with that. As Brent Edwards reminds us, there is a difference between pan-africanism and diaspora. Who do you have to be to understand what I am trying to say here? Maybe you are black. Which could mean your mother was black, your children are gonna be black, which could have led you to believe, understandably that race is something we reproduce with our bodies. You know, over time, diaspora.
I am here to tell you (in the name of the Lorde no less), no. We do not reproduce race with our bodies. The only thing our bodies make is love. The only thing that rightfully lives in our skin is life’s longing for itself. The only thing that our bodies know how to make untaught is love and more love and more love. Because love is the only thing we need. If there was a contents label on my body it would say this person is made of some certain amount of water, which is another name for love, and a certain amount of cells remaking themselves, love. Love is the only thing I have, the only thing I have the RIGHT to make. And that’s what I’m doing here. And because I love you, I am going to be as honest as I can be.
Race is not something we make with our bodies. Race is merely something we survive. Only racism can make and remake race over time. And racism is a story about who can be killed. But that story, does connect us. So black people in the United States, Audre Lorde argues, in an urgent interim report that she stopped the presses on her own book to include...black people in the United States are related to black people in Grenada. But not because of our melanin or the blood in our veins, but because of racism, our killability, we are related by the blood that spills out. Black people in the United States are related to black people in Grenada because the United States is using the story of racism to steal power from all of us. Black people everywhere are related. Kind of like family. You know a group of people you are stuck with for better or for worse, tied to by law and survival, and that doesn’t mean there is love there, but there could be.
Audre Lorde models the practice of how we can relate to our dear relative, our mere relatives, our not very near relatives with love. And the first requirement is that we are honest about the fact that we are not all the same. Black people in the United States paid taxes that funded a military invasion into Grenada, and it was of course, disproportionately black people in that army through which the US invaded Grenada killing the young revolutionaries and imposing an economic situation that among other things caused people living in an island full of trees that produced cocoa beans to IMPORT chocolate. My uncle, who was in the Army at that time wanted so bad to go to Grenada, years and many books later he is glad he didn’t get his wish. But directly or indirectly the same imperialist racism that makes black people in the United States related to black people everywhere, consistenly puts us on opposite sides, of a very dirty coin. As blacks in the US we consent over and over again to violence against other black people done in our name, and usually without our knowledge. Not a very brotherly situation at all.
Audre Lorde is saying, as a mere relative, that it doesn’t have to be that way. We are related through racist systems that we do not control, but we can only look each other in the eye, with love, if we acknowledge our different relationships of power. Who does it benefit when my own oppression here overshadows my privilege in relationship to the people living in places that this country has invaded through the racist ideology of the war on terror. Does diaspora now mean that I am related to Iraqis to everyone in Guantanamo through systems of racism. And if so, how can I be related to those who racism oppresses through intentional solidarity, the practice of love? What kind of intimacy am I trying to create here? I think as we innovate in our study and practice of black diaspora our key concern needs to be the terms under which we are related and the ways the and privileges that our different relationships to power and access make us accountable. Diaspora, I would argue must compel us towards what Jacqui Alexander and Chandra Mohanty would call a democratic transnationalism, where not only our skinfolks become our kinfolks, but where we are accountable to everyone oppressed by racism with a strategic solidarity that acknowledges the systems through which we meet each other. Familiar, and struggling, mere relatives, until we can meet, at home.
Monday, November 03, 2008
For My People: Freedom in Durham
Hey loved ones,
So because I live in Durham I get to be inspired all the time by the brilliance and creativity of people. Not all the brilliant and creative people in the United States live in Durham, it just feels that way sometimes. Like today when a black woman who is a doctor and a mother of 6 came to speak to the Durham School Board and the Durham Public School administration about why students should be able to choose educational alternatives. Or like right now when Durham's Youth Noise Network is broadcasting a voice recording of June Jordan's "On the Night of November 3rd 1992" about the end of the (first) Bush era and speaking about their views on electoral politics.
So I write about Durham...as often as possible...because people act like they don't know about the resilient, resourceful miraculous people living, working and loving here. I wanted to share two examples with you all that are in cyber and book form right now.
First..check out an article I wrote called "The Life of A Poem: Audre Lorde's 'A Litany for Survival' in Post-Lacrosse Durham" for an online journal called Reflections: A Journal of Writing, Service Learning and Community Literacy. It's in blog format so you can post comments..I hope you do!!!!
And THEN....(I am even more excited about this one) get/find/borrow a copy of Abolition Now!: 10 Years of Strategy and Struggle Against the Prison Industrial Complex just out from AK Press!!! This is a book collaboratively edited by the awesome publications committee of Critical Resistance and it features a chapter I wrote called "Freedom Seeds: Growing Abolition in Durham, North Carolina."
I'm so lucky that I get to live here and be inspired by you!!!!!!
love,
lex
So because I live in Durham I get to be inspired all the time by the brilliance and creativity of people. Not all the brilliant and creative people in the United States live in Durham, it just feels that way sometimes. Like today when a black woman who is a doctor and a mother of 6 came to speak to the Durham School Board and the Durham Public School administration about why students should be able to choose educational alternatives. Or like right now when Durham's Youth Noise Network is broadcasting a voice recording of June Jordan's "On the Night of November 3rd 1992" about the end of the (first) Bush era and speaking about their views on electoral politics.
So I write about Durham...as often as possible...because people act like they don't know about the resilient, resourceful miraculous people living, working and loving here. I wanted to share two examples with you all that are in cyber and book form right now.
First..check out an article I wrote called "The Life of A Poem: Audre Lorde's 'A Litany for Survival' in Post-Lacrosse Durham" for an online journal called Reflections: A Journal of Writing, Service Learning and Community Literacy. It's in blog format so you can post comments..I hope you do!!!!
And THEN....(I am even more excited about this one) get/find/borrow a copy of Abolition Now!: 10 Years of Strategy and Struggle Against the Prison Industrial Complex just out from AK Press!!! This is a book collaboratively edited by the awesome publications committee of Critical Resistance and it features a chapter I wrote called "Freedom Seeds: Growing Abolition in Durham, North Carolina."
I'm so lucky that I get to live here and be inspired by you!!!!!!
love,
lex
Monday, October 27, 2008
Thus Saith the Lorde
I am writing these words as a route map
an artifact for survival...
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 I dream of our coming together
encircled driven
not only by love
but by lust for a working tomorrow
the flights of this journey
mapless uncertain
and necessary as water.
-Audre Lorde
an artifact for survival...
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 I dream of our coming together
encircled driven
not only by love
but by lust for a working tomorrow
the flights of this journey
mapless uncertain
and necessary as water.
-Audre Lorde
Wednesday, October 22, 2008
Until...
There are those, bright and visible among us, who believe in a Queer Renaissance...that we can make the world anew by loving transformation with our every action, by building our wishes into place to live, by writing our dreams in deep red pen on every wall that faces us. There are those among us who thread the present into 50 ways to reimagine life at once, teasing the future with incrementally wilder ways to be present. Queer black filmmaker, poet, thinker Julia R. Wallace is one of those.
I'm a fan. (Can you tell?)
As an outgrowth of the collaborative online community transformation venture Queer Renaissance (www.queerrenaissance.com), and a compelling poetic filmic vision, Julia Wallace is creating Until, a poem crystallized into a short experimental narrative film about friendship, love, secrecy, shame and the possibility of freedom. And I want you to know about it. Because I love you.
After hearing the poem and reading the screenplay for Until I already have a crush on the main character. Pro, a quiet loving earnest college student wants the best for her best friend Hailey. And she's thrilled and gratified when after facing rejection from some guy on campus, Hailey wants her. As always though, it gets complicated when the lights turn on. What will it take for each woman to be true to herself in private and in public?
Y'all, reading this screenplay makes me want to be a better braver person. It scrapes up those moments when we choose our fears over each other, and when we choose each other out of fear...it makes me want to build altars and monuments to those public hand holdings and private yeses that risk everything except our integrity. And to those moments when we almost get there.
There should be a billion films like this, but there aren't, and Julia and the crew are shooting November 14-16 in Atlanta so go here to find out more about Until and how you can support that necessary process of making our love, our questions, our hope and our process visible and tangible.
love always,
lex
I'm a fan. (Can you tell?)
As an outgrowth of the collaborative online community transformation venture Queer Renaissance (www.queerrenaissance.com), and a compelling poetic filmic vision, Julia Wallace is creating Until, a poem crystallized into a short experimental narrative film about friendship, love, secrecy, shame and the possibility of freedom. And I want you to know about it. Because I love you.
After hearing the poem and reading the screenplay for Until I already have a crush on the main character. Pro, a quiet loving earnest college student wants the best for her best friend Hailey. And she's thrilled and gratified when after facing rejection from some guy on campus, Hailey wants her. As always though, it gets complicated when the lights turn on. What will it take for each woman to be true to herself in private and in public?
Y'all, reading this screenplay makes me want to be a better braver person. It scrapes up those moments when we choose our fears over each other, and when we choose each other out of fear...it makes me want to build altars and monuments to those public hand holdings and private yeses that risk everything except our integrity. And to those moments when we almost get there.
There should be a billion films like this, but there aren't, and Julia and the crew are shooting November 14-16 in Atlanta so go here to find out more about Until and how you can support that necessary process of making our love, our questions, our hope and our process visible and tangible.
love always,
lex
Sunday, October 19, 2008
Because All Our Love Matters: State Economic Violence and the Beauty of Survival
First National Congress of Mothers: Address of Welcome, Mrs. Theodore W. Birney (1897)
Conference on the Care of Dependent Children: Call for the Conference, Theodore Roosevelt (1908)
Social Security Act of 1935: Title IV-Grants for Sate Aid to Dependent Children (1935)
Social Security Act Amendments of 1939: Old Age and Survivors Insurance Benefit Payments (1939)
"Cleveland Sends 9 Negroes South" New York Times, June 9, (1956)
Illegitimacy and Its Impact on the Aid to Dependent Children Program, Bureau of Public Assistance, (1960)
The Negro Family: The Case for National Action, Daniel P. Moynihan (1965)
"Woman Battles Sterilization Ruling," Harry Trimborn Los Angeles Times, May 31 (1966)
"47 More Negroes Held in Carolina," James T. Wooten, New York Times, November 13 (1968)
Dandridge vs. Williams, Supreme Court (1970)
"Welfare is a Women's Issue," Johnnie Tillmon (1972)
"States Abortion Law Helps Reduce Welfare Costs," Oakland Tribune, (1972)
Hearings on Health Care and Human Experimentation, Niel Ruth Cox (1973)
"Funding Sterilization and Abortion for the Poor," Sheila M. Rothman (1975)
"State of the Union Address," Gerald Ford (1976)
"Restoring the Traditional Black Family," Eleanor Holmes Norton (1985)
(All of the above can be found in Welfare: A Documentary History by Gwendolyn Mink and Rickie Solinger)
Welfare's End, Gwendolyn Mink, (1998)
Still Lifting, Still Climbing: African American Women's Contemporary Activism, Kimberly Spinger ed., 1999
especially:
"Vision Statement", National Black Women's Health Project
"'Triple Jeopardy': Black Women and the Growth of Feminist Consciousness in SNCC, 1964-1975," Kristin Anderson-Bricker
"'Necessity Was the Midwife of Our Politics': Black Women's Health Activism in the 'Post'-Civil RIghts Era (1980-1996), Deborah R. Grayson
Beggars and Choosers: How the Politics of Choice Shapes Adoption, Abortion and Welfare in the United States, Rickie Solinger, (2001)
Soul Talk, Gloria Hull (2001)
Women of Color and the Reproductive Rights Movement, Jennifer Nelson (2003)
The Politics of Public Housing: Black Women's Struggles Against Urban Inequality, Rhonda Y. Williams, 2004 (and props to Rhonda for suggesting most of this reading list)
and
Faubourg Treme (www.tremedoc.com)
www.hermanshouse.org
www.maryturner.org
www.miamiworkerscenter.org
www.poweru.org
www.takebacktheland.blogspot.com
www.jessemuhammed.blogspot.com
www.2-cent.com
and especially Prisons as a Tool for Reproductive Oppression: Cross-Movement Strategies for Gender Justice
Remarks of Gabriel Arkles from Sylvia Rivera Law Project on panel at CR10, 9/27/08
let me start with an excerpt from an email I wrote the other night:
predictably, becoming a 48 hour expert on welfare in the US has made me really really angry.
it's crazy how brutal and extreme the implications of US welfare policy are. the whole set of laws and the political speeches that endorse them are written to make black motherhood a crime and to make the production or sustenance of black life false value, unvalue, negative possibility.
like the federal government funding sterilizations at a 90% rate and abortions only at the rates that the states do (so at the most 50% in the 1970's
or this woman literally going in to jail because she refused to undergo a sterilization she was sentenced to in court for the minor charge or being in a room where she knew marijuana was being consumed.
never meant to survive. never even meant to be born.
but then the miraculous thing is how we keep doing both those things anyway, persistently reborn regardless...
like Martha Benton a black mother who as the leader of a second generation of black women organizing for their right to public housing in Baltimore says of her mentor Goldie Baker "I am her creation."
and like the sisters at what was National Black Women's Health Project and Sister Care and other sustainable health collectives for black women saying "necessity was the midwife of our politics"
and like the women who founded the Georgia Hunger Coalition who I literally saw chant down the evil EBT/food stamp policy makers at the Jimmy Carter Library when I was 18
and like Rosemarie Mitchell at Low Income Families Fighting Together who told me last weekend that her 7 years working for LIFFT is the pursuit of happiness made real even though she cries late at night sometimes
or like Paul Newman, one of my students/adopted siblings who read a poem to a crowd tonight while shaking from nervousness and the chill in the air about how the school to prison pipeline is doing everything to steal his life but how he's a superhero so it can't destroy him.
So anyway. I'm gonna be here tonight writing about it.
because all our love matters,
lex
All our love matters. Neoliberalism be damned.
My reading up on welfare policy and politics in the United States has me wishing I was reading slave code instead.
We have all heard the myth of the welfare queen, having babies 5 or 6 IN ORDER to be poor enough to steal assistance from the government. Some of us have heard that myth over and over again for decades. That is the myth that allowed politicians (most notably Reagan and Clinton) to screw over poor women and children of all races in the United States over by dismantling welfare piece by piece. Somehow repetition got voters to believe that most of the people on welfare to believe that some scandalous black woman with a brood of kids was the typical welfare recipient. To forget that most of the people on welfare have always been white and that (according to the Bureau of Public Assistance itself) only half of one percent of mothers on welfare even have more than 5 kids. And, according to government stats again, most mothers on welfare don't have any kids while they are on welfare and the overwhelming majority of mothers on welfare only have one or 2 kids at all.
But somehow we are all told this story. Poor black young women have kids to cheat money from the US government. Which means that poor black children (and poor children generally) are not only worthless, they create negative value and negative values at the same time. How dare these black women pretend tha the lives of their children are valuable enough to make their survival a community concern. The nerve.
Of course we are hearing the same story about the children of immigrants now. People are coming to the United States to have their children in order to steal benefits, cheating into a citizenship that was never meant to value the lives of the children of those forom the countries that the United States destablizes for economic gain.
This mundane every day set of racist stories teaches, and makes normal the most deadly, inhumane and disgusting lie that has ever been told:
Some lives are worth less than nothing. At birth.
Which of course means, some people should be prevented from being born.
If the denial of benefits to children in need wasn't disgusting enough to someone reading this, please remember that these policies are in bed next to the targeted prevention of certain people's lives from the outset. Gary Bauer, chief aide to Ronald Reagan (who by the way along with all of his other crimes against humanity Reagan is the person who coined the term "welfare queen") blamed the "reckless choices" of poor women who had children the cause of an apocalypse "There will either be no next generation, or there will be a generation that is worse than none at all." Representative E. Clay Shaw of Florida agreed arguing that poor women be sterilized "when they start having these babies one after another, and the terrible thing they are doing to the next generation...something has got to be done to put a stop to it."
What does that mean? "Worse than no generation at all." Whose life is worse than the absence of life on the planet? What does it mean to prefer the end of humanity to a future in which the children of poor women exist?
And everything possible was done. When Georgia and North Carolina and Florida et al failed to make compulsory sterilization a requirement for women receiving welfare, California led the move, first a jusdge sentences a woman on welfare to sterilization for a minor infraction. And the federal goverment when slick institutional violence style, using imbalanced funding to make sterilization more accessible to poor women than abortion. (see Funding Sterlization and Poor Women citation above---i wish it was just a conspiracy theory, but it's not.)
And reading all of this, I was sickened, but not surprised. As Gabriel Arkles points out prisons have an explicit policy to govern the lives of transgendered prisoners in order to "prevent pregnancy" and we know that women who give birth in prison are often sterilized at the moment they give birth under anesthesia and very shady "consent" circumstances. The state, especially a state that has sold itself to neoliberal capitalism has every reason to prevent some folks from being born, some folks from parenting...because the values we create say life is everything, and all life is priceless, our autonomy of when and how we parent is ours, because we, queer, racialized, poor, immigrant radical parents and queer, racialized poor immigrant radical youth are creating a world that is valuable without the sale of people and the enforcement of really bad ideas.
And we are born and reborn again and again. So Bauer and Shaw and so many others are afraid of the world that we ARE creating...with our youth and our rebirth and our literal birth and all the other forms of our creativity.
Be scared. Shit.
Because we are born and birthing and just these past couple of weeks I met some amazing midwives of color like Ayanfe and Anjali and some amazing mamas of color and some amazing youth of color and especially some amazing organizers committed to survival, which is the resounding counter message that our lives mean everything
because all our love matters.
now.
always,
lex
Conference on the Care of Dependent Children: Call for the Conference, Theodore Roosevelt (1908)
Social Security Act of 1935: Title IV-Grants for Sate Aid to Dependent Children (1935)
Social Security Act Amendments of 1939: Old Age and Survivors Insurance Benefit Payments (1939)
"Cleveland Sends 9 Negroes South" New York Times, June 9, (1956)
Illegitimacy and Its Impact on the Aid to Dependent Children Program, Bureau of Public Assistance, (1960)
The Negro Family: The Case for National Action, Daniel P. Moynihan (1965)
"Woman Battles Sterilization Ruling," Harry Trimborn Los Angeles Times, May 31 (1966)
"47 More Negroes Held in Carolina," James T. Wooten, New York Times, November 13 (1968)
Dandridge vs. Williams, Supreme Court (1970)
"Welfare is a Women's Issue," Johnnie Tillmon (1972)
"States Abortion Law Helps Reduce Welfare Costs," Oakland Tribune, (1972)
Hearings on Health Care and Human Experimentation, Niel Ruth Cox (1973)
"Funding Sterilization and Abortion for the Poor," Sheila M. Rothman (1975)
"State of the Union Address," Gerald Ford (1976)
"Restoring the Traditional Black Family," Eleanor Holmes Norton (1985)
(All of the above can be found in Welfare: A Documentary History by Gwendolyn Mink and Rickie Solinger)
Welfare's End, Gwendolyn Mink, (1998)
Still Lifting, Still Climbing: African American Women's Contemporary Activism, Kimberly Spinger ed., 1999
especially:
"Vision Statement", National Black Women's Health Project
"'Triple Jeopardy': Black Women and the Growth of Feminist Consciousness in SNCC, 1964-1975," Kristin Anderson-Bricker
"'Necessity Was the Midwife of Our Politics': Black Women's Health Activism in the 'Post'-Civil RIghts Era (1980-1996), Deborah R. Grayson
Beggars and Choosers: How the Politics of Choice Shapes Adoption, Abortion and Welfare in the United States, Rickie Solinger, (2001)
Soul Talk, Gloria Hull (2001)
Women of Color and the Reproductive Rights Movement, Jennifer Nelson (2003)
The Politics of Public Housing: Black Women's Struggles Against Urban Inequality, Rhonda Y. Williams, 2004 (and props to Rhonda for suggesting most of this reading list)
and
Faubourg Treme (www.tremedoc.com)
www.hermanshouse.org
www.maryturner.org
www.miamiworkerscenter.org
www.poweru.org
www.takebacktheland.blogspot.com
www.jessemuhammed.blogspot.com
www.2-cent.com
and especially Prisons as a Tool for Reproductive Oppression: Cross-Movement Strategies for Gender Justice
Remarks of Gabriel Arkles from Sylvia Rivera Law Project on panel at CR10, 9/27/08
let me start with an excerpt from an email I wrote the other night:
predictably, becoming a 48 hour expert on welfare in the US has made me really really angry.
it's crazy how brutal and extreme the implications of US welfare policy are. the whole set of laws and the political speeches that endorse them are written to make black motherhood a crime and to make the production or sustenance of black life false value, unvalue, negative possibility.
like the federal government funding sterilizations at a 90% rate and abortions only at the rates that the states do (so at the most 50% in the 1970's
or this woman literally going in to jail because she refused to undergo a sterilization she was sentenced to in court for the minor charge or being in a room where she knew marijuana was being consumed.
never meant to survive. never even meant to be born.
but then the miraculous thing is how we keep doing both those things anyway, persistently reborn regardless...
like Martha Benton a black mother who as the leader of a second generation of black women organizing for their right to public housing in Baltimore says of her mentor Goldie Baker "I am her creation."
and like the sisters at what was National Black Women's Health Project and Sister Care and other sustainable health collectives for black women saying "necessity was the midwife of our politics"
and like the women who founded the Georgia Hunger Coalition who I literally saw chant down the evil EBT/food stamp policy makers at the Jimmy Carter Library when I was 18
and like Rosemarie Mitchell at Low Income Families Fighting Together who told me last weekend that her 7 years working for LIFFT is the pursuit of happiness made real even though she cries late at night sometimes
or like Paul Newman, one of my students/adopted siblings who read a poem to a crowd tonight while shaking from nervousness and the chill in the air about how the school to prison pipeline is doing everything to steal his life but how he's a superhero so it can't destroy him.
So anyway. I'm gonna be here tonight writing about it.
because all our love matters,
lex
All our love matters. Neoliberalism be damned.
My reading up on welfare policy and politics in the United States has me wishing I was reading slave code instead.
We have all heard the myth of the welfare queen, having babies 5 or 6 IN ORDER to be poor enough to steal assistance from the government. Some of us have heard that myth over and over again for decades. That is the myth that allowed politicians (most notably Reagan and Clinton) to screw over poor women and children of all races in the United States over by dismantling welfare piece by piece. Somehow repetition got voters to believe that most of the people on welfare to believe that some scandalous black woman with a brood of kids was the typical welfare recipient. To forget that most of the people on welfare have always been white and that (according to the Bureau of Public Assistance itself) only half of one percent of mothers on welfare even have more than 5 kids. And, according to government stats again, most mothers on welfare don't have any kids while they are on welfare and the overwhelming majority of mothers on welfare only have one or 2 kids at all.
But somehow we are all told this story. Poor black young women have kids to cheat money from the US government. Which means that poor black children (and poor children generally) are not only worthless, they create negative value and negative values at the same time. How dare these black women pretend tha the lives of their children are valuable enough to make their survival a community concern. The nerve.
Of course we are hearing the same story about the children of immigrants now. People are coming to the United States to have their children in order to steal benefits, cheating into a citizenship that was never meant to value the lives of the children of those forom the countries that the United States destablizes for economic gain.
This mundane every day set of racist stories teaches, and makes normal the most deadly, inhumane and disgusting lie that has ever been told:
Some lives are worth less than nothing. At birth.
Which of course means, some people should be prevented from being born.
If the denial of benefits to children in need wasn't disgusting enough to someone reading this, please remember that these policies are in bed next to the targeted prevention of certain people's lives from the outset. Gary Bauer, chief aide to Ronald Reagan (who by the way along with all of his other crimes against humanity Reagan is the person who coined the term "welfare queen") blamed the "reckless choices" of poor women who had children the cause of an apocalypse "There will either be no next generation, or there will be a generation that is worse than none at all." Representative E. Clay Shaw of Florida agreed arguing that poor women be sterilized "when they start having these babies one after another, and the terrible thing they are doing to the next generation...something has got to be done to put a stop to it."
What does that mean? "Worse than no generation at all." Whose life is worse than the absence of life on the planet? What does it mean to prefer the end of humanity to a future in which the children of poor women exist?
And everything possible was done. When Georgia and North Carolina and Florida et al failed to make compulsory sterilization a requirement for women receiving welfare, California led the move, first a jusdge sentences a woman on welfare to sterilization for a minor infraction. And the federal goverment when slick institutional violence style, using imbalanced funding to make sterilization more accessible to poor women than abortion. (see Funding Sterlization and Poor Women citation above---i wish it was just a conspiracy theory, but it's not.)
And reading all of this, I was sickened, but not surprised. As Gabriel Arkles points out prisons have an explicit policy to govern the lives of transgendered prisoners in order to "prevent pregnancy" and we know that women who give birth in prison are often sterilized at the moment they give birth under anesthesia and very shady "consent" circumstances. The state, especially a state that has sold itself to neoliberal capitalism has every reason to prevent some folks from being born, some folks from parenting...because the values we create say life is everything, and all life is priceless, our autonomy of when and how we parent is ours, because we, queer, racialized, poor, immigrant radical parents and queer, racialized poor immigrant radical youth are creating a world that is valuable without the sale of people and the enforcement of really bad ideas.
And we are born and reborn again and again. So Bauer and Shaw and so many others are afraid of the world that we ARE creating...with our youth and our rebirth and our literal birth and all the other forms of our creativity.
Be scared. Shit.
Because we are born and birthing and just these past couple of weeks I met some amazing midwives of color like Ayanfe and Anjali and some amazing mamas of color and some amazing youth of color and especially some amazing organizers committed to survival, which is the resounding counter message that our lives mean everything
because all our love matters.
now.
always,
lex
Tuesday, October 14, 2008
Hail the Birth of Quirky Black Girls Magazine!
Quirky Black Girls is a network of fierce black women. We share our dreams, visions, and thoughts with you by producing the feminist publication QBG (Quirky Black Girls) Magazine, a quarterly ezine focusing on politics, cultural criticism, and social change. QBG Magazine features our art, poetry, fiction and nonfiction, and our ruminations on popular culture and social issues.
mission
QBG Magazine aims to provide a forum for Quirky Black Girls - and those who love them - where feminist dialog is the only norm and following your truth is the the only rule.
QBG Manifesta
Because Audre Lorde looks different in every picture ever taken of her. Because Octavia Butler didn't care. Because Erykah Badu is a patternmaster. Because Macy Gray pimped it and Janelle Monae was ready.
Resolved. Quirky black girls wake up ready to wear a tattered society new on our bodies, to hold fragments of art, culture and trend in our hands like weapons against conformity, to walk on cracks instead of breaking our backs to fit in the mold.
We're here, We're Quirky, Get used to it!
.... Quirky Black girls don't march to the beat of our own drum; we hop, skip, dance, and move to rhythms that are all our own. We make our own drums out of empty lunchboxes, full imaginations and number 3 pencils.
Quirky Black girls are not quirky because they like white shit; rather they understand that because they like it, it is not the sole province of whiteness.
Quirky black girls are the answer to the promise that black means everything, birthing and burning a new world every time.
Sound it out. Quirky, like queer and key, different and priceless, turning and open. Black, not be lack but black one word shot off the tongue like blap, bam, black. Girl, like the curl in a hand turning towards itself to snap, write, hold or emphasize. Quirky. Black. Girl. You see us. Act like you know.
We demand that our audiences say "yes-sir-eee" if they agree and we answer our own question "What good do your words do, if they don't understand you?" by speaking anyway, even if our words are "bruised and misunderstood."
Quirky black girls are hot!
Whether you're ready to see it or not.
Quirky means rejecting a particular type of "value," a certain unreadiness for consumption and subsumption in an economy of black heterocapital. This means that Quirky Black Girls act independently of dominant social norms or standards of beauty. So fierce that others may not be able to appreciate us just yet.
No matter what age we are, we hold onto that girlhood drive for adventure, love for friends, independent spirit, wacky sense of humor, and hope for the future.
Quirky Black Girls resist boxes in favor of over lapping circles with permeable membranes that allow them to ebb and flow through their multiple identities.
Quirky Black Girls- Embrace the quirky!
Sunday, October 05, 2008
Combahee Survival
Check out the new Combahee Survival Project from BrokenBeautiful Press!
We were never meant to survive. None of us. We were never meant to find each other, love each other, remember the warriors that came before. We were never meant to know these histories. We were never meant to turn our trauma into a map for transformation. We were never meant to survive. But we do it anyway.
Break it down. Sur viv al. Life underneath waiting to embrace all of us. Survival is a poem written in a corner, found waiting in a basement, forgotten. Survival is when the timeliness of your word is more important than the longevity of one body. Survival is spirit connected through and past physical containers. Survival is running for your life and then running for Albany city council without consenting to the State. Survival is shaping change while change shapes you. Survival means refusing to believe the obvious. Survival means remembering the illegal insights censored in the mouths of our mothers. Survival is quilt patterns, garden beds. Survival means growing, learning, working it out. Survival is a formerly enslaved black woman planning and leading a battle that freed 750 slaves from inside an institution called the United States Military. Survival is out black lesbians creating a publishing movement despite an interlocking system of silences. Survival is a group of black women recording their own voices, remembering a river, a battle, a warrior and creating a statement to unlock the world. Survival is like that.
We were never meant to survive. And we can do even more. This booklet moves survival to revival, like grounded growth, where seeds seek sun remembering how the people could fly. We are invoking the Combahee River Collective Statement and asking how it lives in our movement now. And the our and the we are key to this as individual gains mean nothing if others suffer.
We were never meant to survive but we will thrive. We want roundness and wholeness, where everyone eats and has time to be creative has time to just be, What tools does it give that are necessary to our survival? What gaps does it leave us to lean into? Black feminism lives, but the last of the originally organized black feminist organizations in the United States were defunct by 1981.
Here we offer and practice a model of survival that is spiritual and impossible and miraculous and everywhere, sometimes pronounced revival. Like it says on the yellow button that came included in the Kitchen Table Press pamphlet version of The Combahee River Collective Statement in 1986 "Black Feminism LIVES!" And therefore all those who were never meant to survive blaze open into a badass future anyway. Meaning something unpredictable and whole.
We were. Never meant. To Survive. And here we are.
And beyond survival, what of that? In 1977 the Combahee River Collective wrote "As Black women we see Black Feminism as the logical political movement to combat the manifold and simultaneuos oppressions that all women of color face." They also said "The inclusiveness of our politics makes us concerned with any situation that impinges on the lives of women, Third World and working people." And they concluded: "If Black women were free, it would mean that everyone else would have to be free since our freedom would necessitate the destruction of all the systems of oppression."
Today we, a sisterhood of young black feminists, mentored in words and deeds by ancestors, elders, peers and babies, assert that by meditating on the survival and transformation of black feminism we can produce insight, strategy and vision for a holistic movement that includes ALL of us. So while this is a project instigated by self-proclaimed (and reclaimed) black feminists, our intention is that it can be shared and changed by everyone who is interested in freedom.
Check out the exercises, form a study group, and contribute to the Combahee Survival Zine at www.combaheesurvival.wordpress.com!
We were never meant to survive. None of us. We were never meant to find each other, love each other, remember the warriors that came before. We were never meant to know these histories. We were never meant to turn our trauma into a map for transformation. We were never meant to survive. But we do it anyway.
Break it down. Sur viv al. Life underneath waiting to embrace all of us. Survival is a poem written in a corner, found waiting in a basement, forgotten. Survival is when the timeliness of your word is more important than the longevity of one body. Survival is spirit connected through and past physical containers. Survival is running for your life and then running for Albany city council without consenting to the State. Survival is shaping change while change shapes you. Survival means refusing to believe the obvious. Survival means remembering the illegal insights censored in the mouths of our mothers. Survival is quilt patterns, garden beds. Survival means growing, learning, working it out. Survival is a formerly enslaved black woman planning and leading a battle that freed 750 slaves from inside an institution called the United States Military. Survival is out black lesbians creating a publishing movement despite an interlocking system of silences. Survival is a group of black women recording their own voices, remembering a river, a battle, a warrior and creating a statement to unlock the world. Survival is like that.
We were never meant to survive. And we can do even more. This booklet moves survival to revival, like grounded growth, where seeds seek sun remembering how the people could fly. We are invoking the Combahee River Collective Statement and asking how it lives in our movement now. And the our and the we are key to this as individual gains mean nothing if others suffer.
We were never meant to survive but we will thrive. We want roundness and wholeness, where everyone eats and has time to be creative has time to just be, What tools does it give that are necessary to our survival? What gaps does it leave us to lean into? Black feminism lives, but the last of the originally organized black feminist organizations in the United States were defunct by 1981.
Here we offer and practice a model of survival that is spiritual and impossible and miraculous and everywhere, sometimes pronounced revival. Like it says on the yellow button that came included in the Kitchen Table Press pamphlet version of The Combahee River Collective Statement in 1986 "Black Feminism LIVES!" And therefore all those who were never meant to survive blaze open into a badass future anyway. Meaning something unpredictable and whole.
We were. Never meant. To Survive. And here we are.
And beyond survival, what of that? In 1977 the Combahee River Collective wrote "As Black women we see Black Feminism as the logical political movement to combat the manifold and simultaneuos oppressions that all women of color face." They also said "The inclusiveness of our politics makes us concerned with any situation that impinges on the lives of women, Third World and working people." And they concluded: "If Black women were free, it would mean that everyone else would have to be free since our freedom would necessitate the destruction of all the systems of oppression."
Today we, a sisterhood of young black feminists, mentored in words and deeds by ancestors, elders, peers and babies, assert that by meditating on the survival and transformation of black feminism we can produce insight, strategy and vision for a holistic movement that includes ALL of us. So while this is a project instigated by self-proclaimed (and reclaimed) black feminists, our intention is that it can be shared and changed by everyone who is interested in freedom.
Check out the exercises, form a study group, and contribute to the Combahee Survival Zine at www.combaheesurvival.wordpress.com!
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