Motherful: Liberation as a Reading Practice

"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

"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 :)

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

"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....

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

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!

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

“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

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

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