Eternal Summer of the Black Feminist Mind: Claudia Jones

Jones was known for giving out book lists to women she met on the street, in the laundromat and everywhere else. Our radical reading group honors this legacy.

Eternal Summer of the Black Feminist Mind: Session 3

Claudia Jones---Co-Sponsored by the People's Durham Initiatve

March 31st 6pm

Potluck at Lex's House (alexispauline@gmail.com for directions)

In her crucial book on the political life of Claudia Jones, Carole Boyce Davies describes Jones as "Left of Karl Marx." Jones is literally buried in the same cemetery as Marx, to his left, but Boyce Davies is also suggesting that Claudia Jones a rarely remembered black feminist Trinidadian communist organizer who was deported during the McCarthy Era for her radical beliefs and activities, is also left of Marx politically because her black feminist approach and her empahsis on cultural transformation challenged the limits of Marxism.

In her essay "An End to the Neglect of the Problems of the Negro Women" (download here) Claudia Jones articulates her understanding of how black feminism can transform the left in a revolutionary way. Join us, in Durham or wherever you are in reading and discussing this essay this month (because every month is women's history month!!!!)

love,

BrokenBeautiful Press

SPEAK!: Words of Radical Womyn of Color

Greetings loved ones,
I am THRILLED to let you know about the release of a CD created by SPEAK! a Radical Womyn of Color Media Collective that I have been learning and growing in for the past few years. SPEAK! the self-titled CD is an amazing resource and I'm so proud to be a part of it because I truly believe that it is fierce and transformative in the tradition of This Bridge Called My Back. I know that being part of this process has changed my life.

The CD is available for purchase at www.speakmediacollective.com. The CD is part of a pilot grassroots fundraising project to fund young mothers of color to attend national gatherings within the progressive movement starting with the Allied Media Conference in Detroit this summer.

I am super super proud to be part of this project (even though I am freaked out about the recorded sound of my own voice). One of the featured poems on this CD is "Wishful Thinking" a poem that (as most of you know) I wrote for the National Day of Truthtelling in Durham, NC. I.e. it's a poem a wrote for you.

Your support for this project means everything to me.

love,
lex

p.s. To listen to an interview with Adele...the loving genius diva who first spoke and facilitated the idea that became this CD click here:
http://madamaambi.blogspot.com/2009/03/adele-nieves-speak.html

p.p.s. here is the official press release...SPREAD THE WORD!

SPEAK! WOMEN OF COLOR MEDIA COLLECTIVE RELEASING SELF-TITLED DEBUT CD
UNITED STATES — March 7, 2009– SPEAK! Women of Color Media Collective, a netroots coalition of women of color bloggers and media-makers, is debuting March 7, 2009 with a performance art CD, accompanied by a collaborative zine and classroom curriculum for educators.

handful of Speak! members at the Liquid Words studio

Compiled and arranged by Liquid Words Productions, the spoken word CD weaves together the stories, poetry, music, and writings of women of color from across the United States. The 20 tracks, ranging from the explosive “Why Do You Speak?” to the reverent “For Those of Us,” grant a unique perspective into the minds of single mothers, arrested queer and trans activists, excited children, borderland dwellers, and exploring dreamers, among many others.

“We want other women of color to know they are not alone in their experiences,” said writer and educator Alexis Pauline Gumbs of Broken Beautiful Press, one of the contributors to the CD. “We want them to know that this CD will give sound, voice and space to the often silenced struggles and dreams of women of color.”

The Speak! collective received grant assistance from the Allied Media Conference coordinators to release a zine complementing the works featured on the CD, as well as a teaching curriculum for educators to incorporate its tracks into the classroom environment.

“Speak! is a testament of struggle, hope, and love,” said blogger Lisa Factora-Borchers of A Woman’s Ecdysis. “Many of the contributors are in the Radical Women of Color blogosphere and will be familiar names… I can guarantee you will have the same reaction as to when I heard them speak, I was mesmerized.”

To promote the initiative, the Speak! collective is coordinating listening parties in communities across United States, creating short YouTube promotions illustrating the CD creation process, and collaborating with organizers and activists online and offline.

The CD is available for online ordering at http://speakmediacollective.com on a sliding scale beginning at $12. All inquiries for review copies should be directed to us at speakcd@gmail.com. Proceeds of this album will go toward funding for mothers and/or financially restricted activists attending the 11th Annual Allied Media Conference in Detroit, MI from July 16-19.

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Please spread the word on your blogs and websites!

Sweets for the Sweet: Queer Intergenerational Language Practice

Sweets from the Sweet: intergenerational language (re)production from J. Roxanne on Vimeo.

In Your Hands

Introducing In Your Hands: A Letter Receiving Project
Since love is not scarce, our ancestors bathe us in it every moment that we dare to receive.

I have learned that there are sources of nurturing that are older than us and swifter than our bodies. I am noticing that those who are no longer here in physical form are teachers in the wind, showing us how we must relate to each other, if we want to survive longer than our bodies and longer than a system that denies us.

I have been writing urgent letters to my ancestors since before I knew they were watching and on the cusp of this new year they whispered a suggestion to me. “How about for this new year, as a gift to yourself, you receive some letters from us, the spirits of women that love you from eternity?”

As ever, my answer was yes. These daily letters from the most beloved of my known and chosen ancestors on behalf of all of the ancestors who have sent us love with their lives and dreams without us knowing came at exactly the right time. When I was afraid to trust myself, I was not afriad to trust their guidance for me. I re-learned a shifting methodology of loving myself firstly as their vessel and secondly as their recipient

Here is the first letter I received, from June Jordan:

For Alexis:

Kiss the corners of your face for me. Curlicue the edges of your hair. Your heart is a place for writing the word yes, and you will say no outloud for yourself and this planet when you must.

I will be the bravery, okay let’s be real, the righteous outrage, of waking up and bringing a whole bunch of sleeping mf’s with you.

It’s the littlest ones that overflow with defiance, because we have to. We fit into the cracks this world makes on the bodies and land of the silenced and it is that intimacy, filling, rubbing up against oppression, feeling the jagged spaces with our own constricted breathing, imprint of limitations on our lungs, that makes us scream.

Audre told you. Your anger is not an atomic bomb. The atomic bomb is an atomic bomb. Your voice is the bell of our spirits in the world, clanging rememberance of what whole feels like and what it would look like if we, the planet, really got our stuff together.

When will you seize the world around you with your freedom? NOW and NOW again.

You know I don’t write long letters, and thanks to the technology of heart I don’t have to type this (yes!)

I love you in every piece of your growing soul.

Always,

June

And my ancestors are socialist, so of course they would ask me to share these intimate insights and gifts with you. Of course they would want me to bring their messages to your waiting ears, but more than that I want to share this practice and encourage that you engage it for yourself.

I don’t know what ancestors speak to you or why and when they do, but I have been asked to ask you to listen, lovingly for what the universe wants you to know.

Can you join me? Think of the people who have influenced you, while they were living or through their written, or retold legacies. Just think about them and let your mind relax, let their energy surround and fill you. Create quiet times in your days in case they have something to say.

I encourage you to add your insights here on the “your letters” page if your feel that what you have received could provide healing and wisdom for the rest of us. I encourage you keep your writings for yourself if you feel that they should remain private. The messages of our living dead are sacred. They transcend the norms of intellectual property, and they should be treasured by your best impulse.

My intention here is to share with you an abiding sustaining faith in presence of those who have gone before and their participation in our everyday.

I invite your observance or participation with love.

Always,

alexis

Where is the Love?: Eternal Summer of the Black Feminist Mind Session II

In 1978 at the 4th Annual Conference of Afro-American Writers at Howard University, June Jordan facilitated a historic and controversial panel on "Black Women Writers and Feminism." The talk that she presented "Where is the Love?" defined black feminism as a crucial act of love. Met with some hostility and homophobia from the audience, the talk was later published in Essence Magazine and remains a generations primary interface with what black feminism might mean.

More than 30 years later we are still working through what it means to create community and transformation through a radical understanding of love. Join BrokenBeautiful Press and SpiritHouse for a discussion of this important essay!

In Durham we will be gathering at 1pm on Saturday February 7th.
The essay is available for free download at :http://blackfeministmind.wordpress.com/2009/01/29/where-is-the-love-session-ii/

Feel free to read along and gather wherever you are!
love,
lex

Because We Still Are Here: Radical Women of Color in Solidarity with Palestine

Mai'a Williams and Alexis Pauline Gumbs invite you to participate in a new website documenting and continuting the solidarity of women of color in the United States with the people of Palestine.

email brokenbeautifulpress@gmail.com with any statements of solidarity or documentations of solidarity in action that you would like to share. below is an a excerpt from the site.

www.becausewestillarehere.wordpress.com

we still are here

with our words and with our actions.

on January 3rd, 2009 UBUNTU a women of color/survivor led coalition in Durham North Carolina organized a vigil in solidarity with the people of Gaza. Here are some captioned images from the event.

(photos by Ajamu Dillahunt)

Rachael Derello, the organizer who first voiced the need for a vigil in Durham, sings "We Shall Be Released"

Manju Rajendran, one of the main organizers who MC'd the event reminds the crowd of the need for aid and medical supplies inside blockaded Gaza.

Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Racheal Derello and Kriti Sharma (speakers from UBUNTU) listen as Laylah Haddad describes the violence her family is experiencing in Gaza due to the Isreali bombings.

Laylah Haddad told the crowd that her cousins witnessed children bombed to death while playing dice in front of their home in Gaza.

Theresa El-Amin formerly of SNCC and currently organizing with Solidarity reminded the crowd that the City of Durham had once divested from all connections to Apartheid South Africa and must now divest from the Isreali Aparthied state.

Nadeen Bir and Kifu Faruq hold signs reminding us that "Until Palestine is Free, None of Us Are Free"...and connecting the occupation of Palestine and the occupation of Iraq.

And the little ones raise their voices.

other coverage of the Durham event

http://raleighfist.wordpress.com/2009/01/04/durham-protests-gaza-bombings/

http://www.wral.com/news/news_briefs/story/4238908/

Do Not Forget

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.

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!!!!!

SPEAK!: a CD by Radical Women of Color

Get Ready!!!!!


love,
lex

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.