bodyrock collage poems

Check out these profound and beautiful poems by the students in my "Bodyrock" program at the Potentialis Centre:


Boys
by Queen VIctoria, Age 14

hate love discuss pleasure
pain ugly cute sexy
nerves fight makeup breakup
abuse use wild mean
nice mistake perfect black white

About Life and Dreams
by Mayra, age 17

arts opportunities dreams future
friends music dance graffitti
gangs family love cry
kill sad live health
culture language color hate


Untitled
by Johnson age 9

lava smoke clouds cars
fire me explosion streets
sparks people
flames grass animals screaming
trees mountains houses dirt

Searching for Our Mother's Spike Heels: Inheritance, Subjectivity and the Peril of Walking

Searching for Our Mother's Gardens, Alice Walker, 1982
The Location of Culture, Homi Bhabha, 1994
On the Postcolony, Achille Mbembe, 2001

To keep it real, I read Alice Walker's text because I felt like it and Bhabha and Mbembe because someone recalled those books to the library and I have to return them today. To keep it really real though
1. Mbembe and Bhabha teach me how to spell each other's names. Three letters, and then repeat.
2. Keeping it real is a lost cause.

Alice Walker is crazy. And thank god(dess?). How else could I justify myself? When I introduced Alice Walker to what looked like a crowed of a zillion screaming literates, I feel back on the rhythm of black matrilineal coherence. Verbatim:
"Okay. When Professor Miller offered me the opportunity to introduce Alice Walker, I screamed. (audience laughter) And then I said, 'Wait...until I tell my mother." (audience applause) When I told my mother she screamed. And then she said "Wait (long meaningful pause here) until we tell your grandmother." (the crowd is screaming and losing it in the ecstatic farce of recognition). I think this anecdote is appropriate because...."
But why did I find that anecdote so appropriate? Why did I (instinctually) know that that would be the best thing to say. (And I did know immediately that I would tell that story.) Not only because it is true, I can claim a matrilineal heritage of screaming (though maybe not of waiting...). And not only for the reason that I claimed...that Alice Walker in her work and in her determination to reclaim lost black women writers "makes me and other young black women who write believe we are possible". This is all true...but is this process of creating a legacy necessarily an act of birthing? Could she be the midwife, could we birth ourselves? Does writing, believing you can write really have anything to do with birth. At the time (and to this day in fact) I identified myself as a woman to the extent that I identified myself as a creator of possibility, of worlds, and yes...of words. But that is a personal gender identification and I would be fooling myself if I didn't acknowledge that the crowd there was invested in something far deeper than me and my personal gendered reverse engendering possibility drunk self. The example...as always exceeds its exemplarity.
The crowd loved the story because they want to believe that black women writing is natural, despite the fact that we risk insanity even as we attempt it. The crowd loved the story because they have been taught to believe that inheritance is the way that one gets a property (confused with a possibility) like the ability to write, the privilege of introducing a famous person, the propensity to scream and to wait. And even if we didn't all want to believe it (and we do) Alice Walker certainly believes that the ability to make art depends on a genealogical process crucially related to land.
Why else would one search for our mother's gardens (collective because we are interchangeable or because we need each other so much despite the fact that we have never owned our mothers...or our mother's land or our motherlands...)? In this text the mother's garden is in Africa (where Phillis Wheatley's mother had a garden an not a pen), is in the South (where MLK countered hundreds of years of black southern dispossession and made "home" possible---made inheritance-of struggle? of consciousness? possible...somehow) , is in a quilt in the Smithsonian by an "anonymous women", is in the appropriated text of Virginia Woolf's a room one's own, is in Cuba, is in Conditions Five (which inspires Walker to proclaim "We are all lesbians"--see the Ferguson essay for more buy-in to lesbian as a radical positionality as the seventies turned eighty), is Sarah Lawrence College, is June Jordan's giggle, is definitely Zora's Eatonville, is everywhere that Walker claims by writing an essay and republishing it here under this title. Maybe this isn't inheritance. Maybe this is sharing. Our mother's are ours (are our mothers all African?) Our legacy is something that grows, that has died, that we never owned, that we have to lie and risk snakebites (and worse) to mark with a tombstone. Our children are a menace to artistic productivity, a poor substitute for character development...though maybe they can coexist...if we don't kill them.
(Rough transition I know) Bhabha uses Toni Morisson's Beloved to theorize something that haunts and doubles and splits modernity while refusing to reproduce it: the repressed time-lag of enlightenment domination through colonization and enslavement. Whereas I have been thinking about diasporic subjectivity as the experience of being haunted (even hunted...see Rita Dove) by a traumatic past (of slavery and colonialism and gendered economic violence more generally) that keeps on coming, Bhabha emphasizes the way that this diasporic subjectivity haunts a western enlightenment idea of nation that keeps trying (and failing it seems) to repress it (us). He emphasizes this haunting as a "finding the join...i want to join" (in the words of the character beloved--but also through Handsworth Songs, Sonia Sanchez etc.) as an impetus for solidarity or a new way of thinking the international through the minoritarian haunting within the socalled nation in the postcolonial moment.
Is there a new way of thinking the region in this postcolonial moment. I missed it if Mbembe offered such a possibility in his articulation of the Afro-Continental temporal category "the post-colony". I think Mbembe succeeds in writing a social theory of contemporary Africa for contemporary Africa (if this means insisting on Africa as it's own complicated context and not as the empty imaginary required by the west...though I don't know who he really wants to buy and read and respect this book), to the extent that Africa holds as a category inherently. I am interested in the way that male domination, vulgarity, virility, emasculation and attention to orifice come up in this text...because it seems incomplete. What are the actual gender dynamics in an"emasculated" postcolonial economy run by indirect private control? What is the relationship between rape of Africa and rape in Africa? I won't do this, but it would have been interesting to write about this text next to Wynter's because it makes me want to know more about the relationship between Africa and the "new world" in the development of a violent western imaginary in her framework. I am so thoroughly impressed and convinced by this text as a useful explication of the economics of colonialism and the present that I almost forget to ask why it is that it is violence and vulgarity that make this text's eloquence. Why is Africa complicated and compelling because of terror and death and nothingness and martyrdom? Professor Spivak would ask Mbembe what his privilege and or position is. What does he get from this presentation..who does he become? What does he enable or foreclose? What does he inherit or pass on?
What (in)deed.

bestseller!

hooray! our anthology is a best seller!

check it out:
http://teachingforchange.org/busboysandpoets/Top20.htm

buy it! girlchildpress.com

love,
lex

"and yes, i'm bragging"

These are some of the poems that my students at the Potentialis Center Summer Camp wrote today! Today we wrote about our clothes and our bodies.

I have boney teeth
my eyeballs are bloody!
My cheeks are fat
my lips are chubby
my nose is also bloody
and my ears are wacky.

-Lydia, age 7

Dear Victoria,
I'm your Boston jersey dress. I love the way your smooth skin hairs rub against me like a massage. Your skin is very beautiful and silky like. You wear me out like you're the boss. It makes the cute boys holla and girls hate even more because of your taste in style. I really admire you because I'm not so tight on you so I can't breath like everyone else, which you are not. I love you and I'm proud to be your own dress. Thanks for giving me a chance to show you what I can do for you.
Sincerely,
Your Boston Jersey Dress
-Queen Victoria, age 14

A note from Mayra's earrings:
We love it when Mayra goes to parties because she makes other earrings jealous. We love her because she always tries to look good with us and she always brings us different places.

-Mayra, age 17

A note from Garrett's hat:

I love to sit on Garrett's head, on his nice fluffy curly black hair. If I were him I would be the happiest human on earth, and yes I'm bragging.

My hair and my hat are royal, royal enemies. And don't ask why.

-Garrett (lil G), age 8

cheat

or a poem (mostly) made out of the letters of my name
(from a workshop that I led at the Potentialis Center)

lean as a pen
in the lie of exile
alexis's skin is a lax prison guard
six signs towards up
a line that sails
an axe that slips
a spin that lisps
a lai, a lapa, a lap, a sip, a pal, a lip
that is not for sale

a better poem
by Garrett Franklin Wilkins age 7
(made from his name @ Potentialis)

get a rat an' slap it tar.
an' take it far in a star.
lie it in the star an' skin it neat.

spelling "blight"

(or verbalizing gentrification)

"blight: v. (Perhaps from the same roots as bleak; the meaning of blight in that case comes from to be, to grow, or make white or pale, bleach.) To affect with blight; to blast; to prevent the growth and fertility of; hence to ruin; frustrate; as to blight one's prospects."
-Webster's New International Dictionary of the English Language
G and C Merriam Company, 1933

i.
b land
b lock
b lot
b lank
b lond ( i said lawned)
b lithe
b lame
b lin(e)d
b leach

ii.
b light
b laze
b lush
b link
b lur
b lare
b lue
b loom
b lood (or lewd)
b lade (you heard me)
b leed (so lead)
b liss
b less
b low
b lack
b last

An OTHER Way to Be:EthnoAberrations in Wynter and Ferguson

"Ethno or Socio Poetics" Sylvia Wynter (in Alcheringa), 1976
Aberrations in Black: Towards a Queer of Color Critique Roderick A Ferguson, 2004

Walking on a sunny afternoon in downtown Oakland some summers ago, a woman jumped out of nowhere and proceeded to ambush me with an unsolicited reading of my "blue-green" aura, insisting that she had an important warning for me, if I could pay for her services. In response, the friend that i was walking with (a third generation American communist) concluded, "Capitalism. Makes people do the wildest shit."

Indeed. Wynter and Ferguson are both concerned with the relationship between the capitalist production of certain racialized groups as "surplus", the dependence of this relations on the construction AND production of wildness, heresy, and deviance. Wynter and Ferguson, in different ways are interested in reclaiming that wildness, heresy and deviance as revolutionary potential.

Wynter's essay, from a talk at a conference on Ethnopoetics (featuring Glissant's formulation of natural/forced poetics on which I have been/will be writing about for months---and a talk by Fred Jameson which admits to stealing Wynter's title and doesn't do much besides emphasize the penultimate paragraph of Wynter's talk as a warning for us all) came out almost 30 years before Aberrations in Black...so ladies first.
(excuse me while i meditate on the experience of watching Sylvia Wynter speak via video at the Assoc of Caribbean Women Writer's Conf)

To be Sylvia Wynter for even one Jamaican afternoon...to have two y's in my name and to question the foundations of Western Civilization through a razor sharp economic analysis as an expert...as a master thief who immediately owns all of the knowledge that she will cripple...to speak in whole clear sentence that incorporate obscure quotes by Nieztche...to let Stanford pay me for the use of my name alone...and at the same time to deny them my presence until it suits my convenience...to sit in sunlit offices with open windows (in Jamaica, in California, in Florida) and to point out the single lie that gives us this unsatisfactory world. Sigh.

So... in this earlier talk, at the Ethnopoetics conference 30 years ago Wynter does what she does and puts socio next to ethnos, demanding as usual that this concept around which her fellows (literally she's usually the only woman wherever she is) have gathered emerge in its historical specificity, tracing the term ethnos back to them moment when it stopped meaning "we" and began to mean a dehumanized heretical "they" upon which the new "we" depended on. Wynter describes the 16th century development of a global economy through european colonization as a mutation in the human narrative through which "we" became a violent category dependent on and enforced through the abuse of a dehumanized "other". The discovery of the "new world" populated with "others" is for Wynter the X-factor that caused a former "we" among other "we"'s to become THE "we" against which all others would be measured and punished. For Wynter this is the birth of the mutation that she called Western capitalism (and which she now calls global capitalism) the discovery of the new world is the catalyst for such a mutation. Racism then is not an aberration, but is rather the mechanism through which a surplus is created...is the mechanism through which some labour (and life-value) becomes undervalued and some becomes overvalued.
This is achieved through the creation of cultural norm through which deviance can be ascribed to others. In her more recent talk she was explicit about pointing out that the function of "blackness" in creating an overvalued white norm is one tendency among others that include the delination of queerness as the mechanism through which straight privilege is bolstered and rewarded and criminality as the mechanism through which "respectable" consumption is validated (thus her current empahsis on prisons).

Ferguson would agree...but with more attention to the transgressive relationship to space that the relationship between the nation and surplus labor requires. While Wynter would emphazise that the racist secular construction of humanism depends on the labelling of racialized people as deviant, Ferguson is interested in the way that this surplus relationship requires (for example in the context of the great migration) racialized people to move (and be displaced)in ways that create fundamentally queer positionalities, subjectivities and performances. For Ferguson the relationship between capitalism and the nation as narrative and economic entities (if looked at deconstructively) produces an important queerness. However, according to Ferguson everyone...including Marx is in denial about this. Ferguson focuses on the figure of the prostitute as the exemplary figure of capitalist alienation and points out the way in which this figuration frames Marxist critique in a way that validates heteropatriarchal norms...in concert with the racist narrative of the reproductive nation-state as such.

SO Ferguson wants an economic critique of capitalism and the nation that does not reproduce a heteropatriarchal logic. In fact he wants to emphasize the queerness that this relation is already requiring from the subjects involved. In other words Capitalism(and the nation-state). MAKES people do the wildest shit. For Ferguson the question is how to acknowledge this relationship in a way that amplifies these queer subjectivities into something that articulates an OTHER way to be.

Similarly, Wynter wants to emphasize the way in which black cultural production has created a mode of being human which does not require the negation of another in order to create community. She wants to argue that whereas western capitalism offers a model through which objects (technologies of war and production) name and create another object "labelled human" and produce a relationship in which one human being is master and another human being is servant based on their relationship to the means of production, poetics (and by this she means art generally) offers a mode in which human beings name the world and are human because their active relation to the world is one of creation.

So what do I learn from this? What do I make from this in my current work to somehow use poetry to create non-violent community structures here in my neighborhood? Well conveniently (providing a concrete continuity between the blog that comes before this) Ferguson talks about the third world women's movement (sparked in order to mobilize in response to brutality against women of color just like this work that we're doing) as a fundamental site because of the way that "lesbian" was used as a label that referred to a critique...not a relation to a state, a race, the means of production or the means of heteropatriarchal reproduction. And conveniently this exact movement is a major focus of my work and a model through which i act as a community artist. SO all this talk of other and critique not only helps to clarify the function of the word "queer" in my self-description and analytic intervention, but also means that as we activartists avatars "we", ethno and poetic in this socio, speak we create our community relations and we do that not as identification but as critique and therefore as constantly co-produced recreation (in the sense of making a world again and in the sense of having fun outside of the context of alienated labor.)
Yes.

producing the crisis: reproduction, the underclass, self-publishing and unlikely pleasure

Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State and Law and Order, Stuart Hall et al, 1978
Narratives: Poems in the Tradition of Black Women, Cheryl Clarke (Kitchen Table Press), 1982
Un Marquer de Paroles (preface to Chamoiseau's Chroniqu de Sept Miseries), Edouard Glissant, 1986
Order, Disorder, Freedom and the West Indian Writer, Maryse Conde (Yale French Studies), 1993
Time Binds or Erotohistoriography, Elizabeth Freeman (Social Text), 2005

What pleasure have I been hiding, even as I seek to articulate an "ethics of queer desire"? It seems that my relationship to the word "ethics", works well in terms of "accountability" and "justice" and "so on and so forth":), but when it comes to desire I believe that I may be creating an unacknowledged binary between "ethics" and "desire". In other words...in my recent writing, our ethics is not something we adopt because it turns us on. Our ethics is something that our oppression makes necessary, that our trauma forces us into, or at the very least something that my poetic and convincing arguments make obvious, not as choice, but as an imperative. No good. Disclaiming myself to the predicament of forced poetics, I lament the fact that I have been reincorporating the energy of desire into the duty of ethics (and doing so because i need your agreement so badly) and not admitting to the pleasures that I already get, and am motivated by in this (still maligned) practice of being free. man as in Elizabeth Freeman in her convincing contribution to the "What's so Queer About Queer Studies now?" issue of Social Text points out that oppressed folks generally, and queer people specifically connect to each other across time, not merely through traumatic renewal of violence, but also through pleasure desire...and in my case booklust. I mean what is it that I am doing anyway but creating a breathless links to past and future black girls through reading back/writing back/writing towards/writing because of the fact that it turns me on? This is pleasure that I need, an ethical pleasure that requires me to face my multiple partners and fall apart YES, because of the trauma that has not stopped, but also because i want you.
How else can I explain why i keep on reading these little books by these crazy third world women who were writing circa 1982. I want to think of it as a queer desire for the maternal (the ephemeral material): black women disperse into paper and I am born. So Cheryl Clarke for example self-published, community published and republished (goshdarnit) her book of poems in 1982 with the collaboration of women as illustrators (GAIA) and typesetters, and blurb writers and printers. And she wrote about madness and trauma and pleasure. She wrote about creepy families and solid lesbian love. She wrote about embattled pleasures secreted in kitchens and women who broke her heart. She wrote about violence and silence and made them stop rhyming for a bit. She was (for me) articulating "tradition" in a way that was not biological, patriarchally reproductive, but that felt real anyway. Printing...even printing two editions...should not be called reproduction because it is unlikely, not natural clearly embattled and nonetheless as strategy that black queer women are embracing...in a queer way. I still want to call that co-production. We'll see. What is clear though is that Clarke (and shortly following of course Shange, Walker, Morrison will do this too) needs to make visible the violence experienced by girls and women under the cover of race coherence such that that violence is not reproduced again.
In an brilliant and long-relevant collaboratively written monograph that thinks in careful Marxist/revisionist Marxist terms (Policing the Crisis) Hall et al seem to unwittingly reproduce the invisibility of black women or at least seem to lose the opportunity to analyze the feminization of the black labor class that is perpetually reproduced and disenfranchised. This collective does what Irigaray does (and what the third world women's movement at least from the moment of the combahee river collective statement cannot afford) and forecloses intersectionality by presentingthe struggle of unemployed blacks in the streets and women in the home as parellel struggles. What about the black women who are out in the street..what about the other,non-sensationalized violence committed against black girls and women at home? Why mention the black hustler pimp specifically and the prostitute only through Marx? Why is it so salient to quote the racist sentencing judge pointing out that "notably no west indian women have been mugged", but then not relevant to look at the gender dynamics in a masculinized unemployed/criminal underclass that they are analyzing specifically through economics of reproduction and the reproduction of an economic relationship. I guess because that is my work to do...but damn.
Glissant would seem to fall into somewhat of the same trap in his analysis of language (in his analysis of the forced and the natural as i am writing about elsewhere) but also in the preface to Chronique...where he centralizes the djobuer, marginally informally employed cart pushers in Martinique, as the site oflanguage production, code making, and logic changing resistance. This kind of masculine, tentative, magical work of course also becomes the marvelously real work of writers in the West Indies...and the male writers specifically...unsurprisingly.
Conde draws this out in her article, but I think the reproduction is still playing an invisible role in her argument, or at least some sor tof naturalized gender binary which seems only to be a slight reappropriation of the momentum of stereotype. In this text "order" is what male writers do in order to reproduce themselves and achieve their ambitions for political power. In "order" to do this they must suppress the desires and the violent experiences of women which would awaken a femininized "disorder" in the region. "Freedom" on the other hand is yet to come, and is evidently in the province of the youth. Forced poetics again? Is it that coherence requires this formulation to emerge in the configuration of a bad, but productive heterosexual dialectical coupling of order and disorder?
The concept of forced poetics (the reason that i will critique but never abandon glissant) seems to have with in it the presence of force and the structure of rape that is always being denied, repressed and suppressed. Freeman might want to insert some SandM logic to the other possibilities of a forced poetics...like pleasure (like filling other things up besides wounds...as she puts it). Could it be that my positionality (informed by a global order of rape that will never be necessary evil..or otherwise justified in my view at all) that puts me next to you is not to be seperated by my all consuming love for you, want for you, want for us to be free?

three

alexis is a third world
dislocated
queer
like the holy ghost
everywhere
like desire
like the possibility of poison
like numerical magic
like tri
like try
like trying
to be free

desire: spirit and flash

photography, the haitian diaspora, dance and white west indian sex for sale
The Spirit of Haiti, Myriam Chancy, 2004.
Desire in Seven Voices, (Dionne Brand et.al) 2003.
Voyage in the Dark, Jean Rhys, 1934.
Picturing Us: African American Identity in Photography, Deborah Willis ed., 1994.
American Smooth, Rita Dove, 2004.
The Collector of Treasures and Other Botswana Village Tales, Bessie Head, 1977

So here I go again, trying to smash together the six books that I happen to have read most recently as if they are thematically linked. Just be happy that I didn't add Stuart Hall et al's Policing the Crisis...which I technically finished in the middle of writing this blog. So. Let's play. To be honest these books look like the reason slightly unfocused black instructors name their courses "diasporic"...but of course (well not "of course") Jean Rhys is not necessarily black. Maybe together these books mark out at multi-sited geneaology of desire. Maybe together these books actually do help with the inconvenient definition of "diaspora" that I am more interested in: that falling apart on the level of the body, the space, the call for an ethics of queer desire.
According to Dionne Brand in her submission for this Canadian collection on Desire "maybe to desire is to complicate", and definitley in her piece, desire is what provokes the act of reading. Since the rest of the collection seems to focus on rather creepy complexes and sexual appetites/secrets of some Canadian women writers...mostly, usually heterosexually desiring the same(homo)old(ancien)thing-with the notable and delightful exception of Shani Mooto-tho even Mooto has daddy issues...dissappointingly...all of these women want the love of a father figure...Mooto simply moves thru wanting to be her father in order to have access to women...and then finally wanting to be her damn self-but I digress. Since Brand's chapter in this collection is (predictably) most useful to me, I want to invoke Desire as a complication, as an act of reading...provoked by the representation of the body falling apart.
So (which) things fall apart? Haiti falls apart, and as the trend which is leading to my redefinition of diaspora goes, Chancy represents this falling apart on the linked levels of the body and the geographically political space. Starting before the Haitian revolution...and the violent aftermath...which still had not ended..and so therefore moving through to the repeated US/Europe invasions (official, economic and criminal) Chancy focuses on the body and spirit of a visionary wracked by AIDS and trapped in sex tourism, military violence before and after Aristide, street violence against Haitian immigrants in the US, and domestic violence "at home" in Canada. The political, physical and emotional narratives of this text are experienced in the temporality of trauma. Interestingly, so is the spiritual. Spiritual voices of the "long-dead but not departed" witness of the full history of Haiti haunt the narrative, but also allow for transcendence and facilitate connection. As usual this text is somewhat queer, but strangely it ends in a very Masters of the Dew type of way. In this case it is the "other woman" who dies(Leah the blind water goddess advisor...who has a sensual relationship with Carmen...she who gives birth) and somehow the beautifully named central male artist character "Alexis" steps in to father the child of a traitorous white man. SO what does it mean for these trauma borne voices of resistance and connection to facilitate connection in the specific form of a new water goddess with an racially mixed nuclear family with recuperated haitian parentage? (in this sense the text might be refusing its own falling apart).
(Transition from Chancy paragraph version A)White girls fall apart too (as maybe the birth of a racially impure...quarter haitian water goddess insists)...Jean Rhys's scandalous novel detailing the life of a creole (white west indian) chorus girl-turned kept woman-turned whore in England. Yes. Suprisingly (to me) this story seems to have the power to make at least two islands or an empire fall apart. Told in a mode of trauma that disrupts narrative and dealing with a source of rape and unviability on bodily and colonial economic levels this text rails against British concepts of purity, economic coherence and sexual propriety/property seeming to insist that the colonial relation reveals the impossibility of all of these things.
(Transition from Chancy paragraph version B) Speaking of the persistance of reproduction, Deborah Willis's project "Picturing Us" makes me wonder about the funciton of photography. Or really, is it possible to be non-reproductive in a book about photographic reproduction? Interestingly almost without exception these essay, which are supposedly about African-American Identity, end up being about African-American family. (Granted one author does try to queerly halt his mother from taking the reproduction action that will produce him...and then tries to step in to her photographic place...and also granted that somehow family and photograph do equal death for this and one other writer..but still.) Still indeed this is some sort of collective photo album...which worries me and (i think) limits the collection's ability to challenge the status quo.
While Rita Dove's American Smooth is somewhat dependent on the trope of men and women dancing with each other in pairs, and on military and juridical citizenship, it does seem that Dove opens up a space for critique. Dove make sa concerted effort to rewrite or unravel the bible and maybe even the constitution to a lesser degree. i think the long poem on hunting, "Meditation at 50 Yards: Moving Target", especially the section written in the voice of the bullet exemplifies the "homecoming" that is the body falling apart (when the bullet "comes home" into the target) and this falling apart is related to the ways that bodies do and do not connect while dancing.
Have I overdetermined my reading of Bessie Head with my irresponsbile and repeated invocation of Achebe? Perhaps. What is important to me about this, Head's first ever collection of short stories, is that I think it is a good example of diasporic literature written on and about the "original" continent. Head's are stories in each case about gendered violence that changes the bodies and physical locations of the characters. Colonial frameworks and neocolonial economics often play a role in this dispersing violence, but in the geneology Head creates this dispersing is older than them and can just as easily be instigated by masculinst new nationalist governments. In each case the queer an invconvenient prioritization of love between and for women is what causes the creation of new modes of community...especially in the title story in which women who have killed their husbands create some sort of utopia in prison.
I'll stop there...my next post will talk about crime and theories of black underclass...treating Policing the Crisis and Glissant's essay on "djobeurs" *which i'll be reading in french!!!* peace