Saying (Gratitude Poem #3)

Goodness daily!
It is such an honor and pleasure to have an excuse write a poem of long due gratitude to an exemplar in my life, who saw a community organizing accountable writer in me when I was just a straight-haired-platform-shoe-wearing-confused-self-righteous teenage so and so. Kavi I adore you!!! Thanks so much for contributing to my dream trip to Audre.

Anyone else who wants to chip in can check out: http://alexispauline.chipin.com/praise-the-lorde-st-croix-dream-trip


Saying

for Kavita Rajanna

After Audre Lorde's "Building"

Kavi has permission
to roam the earth
to charge the air
with the sit down
of revolution
is not often taken
for local
at home

Kavi gives permission
to the fly and fearful
the restless and the rest
to remember
it is not that serious
it is exactly serious enough
to sit down
stay home
and dig in
for the revolution

Kavi places deep roots
and billboard blasphemy
without permission
vein strung seriousness
free of vanity
is taken
with the local
lifelong levity
of being
revolution.

Kavi on a mission
is a decolonial wheatpaste
and a heartfilled breakfast
and a reading suggestion
and the clarity of context
and a way worth walking behind
and a truth worth tracking
and is fiercely local
and is here
wherever here is
which is home.

Just saying.

Sunlight (Gratitude Poem #2)

Sunlight

For Linda Thurston, Mumia Abu-Jamal and the hunger striking prisoners in California who included in their demands...sunlight.

After Audre Lorde’s “Production”

Sweet leaks out the droning walls

call it hard-knocks monastery

call it Ghandi split and shackled

call it honey in a bitter built hive

Call it hunger

low voiced and steady

call it straining the flow

sweet don’t stop in the brackish brace of bars

sting our stumbling

our slowness our sloth

sting our floral forgetting

honey breathe deep

something is blooming in the dark

slice through thick blink invisible

slice through wax paper apathy

sweet leaks out

brown face in every full crack of air

seeking

sunlight

P.S. Linda:

Your vigilant invitation

for all our attention

to the CA Prisoners hunger strike

was activating heat

to the chlorophyll of change.

P.P.S. The gratitude poem series is my way of thanking the contributors to my dream trip of a lifetime to visit Gloria Joseph (whose beekeeping inspired the poem that inspired this poem) and to commune with the spirit of Audre Lorde!!! I am so excited! To contribute to this trip chip in at: http://alexispauline.chipin.com/praise-the-lorde-st-croix-dream-trip

Gratitude Poem #1

Greetings Family!

I am overjoyed to have been invited by brilliant Black Feminist Dr. Gloria Joseph to visit her in St. Croix and to commune with the spirit of my chosen ancestor Audre Lorde. I am inviting my whole community to contribute to my dream trip (http://alexispauline.chipin.com/praise-the-lorde-st-croix-dream-trip) and I have committed to write a poem inspired by Audre Lorde's The Marvelous Arithmetics of Distance for each contributor.

It is fitting and humbling that the very first person to contribute to my dream trip to visit Gloria Joseph in St. Croix is a person who started to read Audre Lorde the same time as me, back when we were teenagers looking. Someone who has known my poetry almost as long as I have, and who is also one of my favorite writers.

There is neither the first poem, nor the last poem by Alexis Pauline Gumbs for Elizabeth Rose Anderson. There is a special challenge in writing a poem for someone who for whom my poetry has no novelty anymore. :) So bullshit-free...this is for you WMCR:

For Elizabeth

After “Echoes” by Audre Lorde

There is a tinge of certainty

it comes from being heard

being known over time

it comes from not having to say

my scream is the same as my silence some days.

The grave is not still

it is choice

it is where our ancestors roll over

to hear a conversation that don’t stop

it is listening beyond escape

it is the decided irrelevance of distance.

So now in the time where future unravels

where promise tattoos

into long-held dreams coming true so fast

we heal doubt kill fear

rebirth those who said our blood was glitter

our truth was optional who said

it was our youth had fooled us into possible

There is a dirt root depth of voice

that comes from saying what

I do not need to say to you

who know and knew

we were always possible

we are proof

we are here

-Alexis Pauline Gumbs (July 26, 2011)

Announcing Juneteenth Freedom Academy for Educators August 8-12 in Durham, NC!

Juneteenth Freedom Academy Summer Intensive for Educators:

Rituals for Transformative Presence

August 8-12, 2011

Durham, NC

because you were that genius kid in the back of the room looking out the window. because you were that young Malcolm X that the teacher wasn't ready for. because you were that Charlotte Hawkins Brown making your own school in yards and parlors. because you have always known that where ever you are learning is possible. because you don't remember much of 10th grade biology except that the teacher seemed to really listen to really make it accessible even when you didn't care. because there was something that happened in the classroom that made you want to come back and fix it, come back and honor it, come back and create a classroom of your own. because you are here for the kids, not for the standards and obviously not for the money. because you remember every day that people's movement in the US and in the world have been led by students. because you know that the place where nerds meet gang members is the place where the Black Panther Party was born, and that meeting could be reconvened in any classroom any day now. because it's still about that moment when you learn something new and the students realize that they are teachers already, and leaders and a force in the universe that cannot be stopped.

Because your presence is a catalyst, because your students are a prophecy. Because June Jordan said it best... "we are the ones we've been waiting for."

The Premise:

Every social justice artist and genius and their brilliant mama is publishing a curriculum, hoping to reach the students you work with, without ever seeing their faces. And sometimes the content is brilliant. But most educational institutions, including public schools, after school programs, independent schools, community colleges and four-year colleges and graduate programs already have their own mandatory or chosen content. So...

This course acknowledges what has the most influence on students while they are in the classroom, the people who are there, the educators and each other and the energy we are all empowered to bring into the space.

This course offers:

*Silence (templates for self-generated, updateable affirmations and reminders designed to get you ready to be powerfully present and spiritually grounded before you enter the classroom)

*Sound (ways to fine tune and amplify your level of listening and responding to/being present for your particular students)

*Space (a process for designing guidelines and rituals that allow students to be present to EACH OTHER and the wisdom that surrounds them)

*Support (co-mentoring relationships and networking with other transformative teachers)

The Paradigm:

Juneteenth Freedom Academy is created in honor of the black feminist educator, poet, parent and political activist June Jordan. We invoke her work as part of our task in continuing to spread the scattered message that slavery is over, in particular to those systems that continue to sell life and kill dreams. We believe that teaching in oppressed communities with accountability to oppressed people can be a subversive act that is ultimately accountable to freedom, not the reproduction of conformity as usual across generations. June Jordan taught in public libraries and schools, in independent underfunded Saturday supplemental programs, in state university classrooms, at Yale, in prisons, in community centers, in children's books, in lectures and in living rooms. The Juneteenth Freedom Academy for Educators draws on Alexis's privileged access to June Jordan's archival materials to use her syllabi, unpublished essays, course readers and student publications as resources for freedom in our lifetimes.

My brilliant and beloved co-conspirator and teaching partner Gardy Perard speaks with the clarity and precision of a mathematician. He says that the primary question for educators is how to bring freedom, possibility, power and connection into every teaching context. Together with Nia Wilson, Nikki Brown, Heather Lee and Zachari Curtis as co-facilitators of the Choosing Sides Program, a SpiritHouse program based in an alternative school in Durham serving students who were long-term suspended or expelled from Durham Public Schools, often for activities related to their involvement in street organizations, we created a student centered atmosphere of transformation and learning based on our internalized memory that the place where academics meet criminalized street organizers is a place of unstoppable power, is the generative collaboration that made the Black Panther one of the fiercest, most effective and most revolutionary organizations we know about.

Our accountability to the particularity and genius of the students that we worked with over the years pushed us to create practices to honor the truth that transformative education is not about transforming students. It is about being present for their inherent brilliance and assisting them in transforming their and our relationships to oppressive institutions. This is sacred work. Because most of our teaching takes place in places impacted by oppressive systems, and because we and any student we might encounter are impacted by oppressive institutions the work of creating liberatory space takes rituals and practices before, during and after the classroom encounter that generate the transformative energy of staying present to each other's brilliance no matter what.

Supportive Course Components:

*weeklong summer institute in Durham, NC to work with templates, practices and to engage readings from June Jordan, the Black Panther Party, and Alexis Pauline Gumbs! (August 8-12)

*full color PDF workbook with posters, pocket reminders and accessories

*first month back interactive and motivating conference calls (August 25-September 25)

*video seminar to share with colleagues

*quarterly optional online-enabled participant hosted gatherings

*the presence podcast and reminder PSA's from Alexis

Sign Up:

1. email brokenbeautifulpress@gmail.com BY JULY 20th with your intention to participate and responses to these 3 questions

a. what is the community of students you are accountable to/working with

b. what do you hope to gain from this course

c. what is every possible way to contact you :)

d. how you will support the course

2. Support the course!!!

Support the Course!!!

Your presence is priceless. No one will be turned away from the course for financial reasons. HOWEVER support for the course is crucial. Here are suggested ways to support your participation and to keep transformative autonomous spaces like this thriving:

*Please ask your school, organization, institution, employer, community to support your participation in this priceless experience. The institutional sponsor rate is sliding scale $200-500 depending on your assessment of what your institution can afford.

*Another option is to support the course individually in relatively affordable installments. Become a sustainer of the Eternal Summer of the Black Feminist Mind at a level you feel comfortable with:

*Mobilize your community! Take the opportunity to share the awesome thing you are doing with your mentors, friends, loved ones and allies and allow them to donate in your name. Send them this button and remind them to put your name in "notes" so that I can tell you to thank them!

*And offer a trade! Want to bring other resources to the event? (Food, materials, healing practices, resources I haven't imagined?) Make a proposal.

See you there!!!!!

Love,

Alexis Pauline Gumbs

Indigo Days Podcast: Sacred Black Feminist Blues

Greetings loved ones,

Indigo Days a transformative gathering of warrior healers came to close this past Thursday. But the impact of warrior healers is ETERNAL so of course the impact of Indigo...Ntozake Shange's visionary creation and of the work of black warrior healers does not end. For all of you who attended Indigo Days and blessed the space with your transformative love, and all those who wished they could have been there in body as well as spirit and all those who supported with food, transportation, space, donations and materials this brilliant podcast...created by the resident blues scholars and DJ of the Quirky Black Girls Movement is for YOU!!!!

Enjoy!!!!

[audio http://brokenbeautiful.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/bbs-podcast.mp3]

Direct Link: http://brokenbeautiful.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/bbs-podcast.mp3

P.S. If you'd like to be part of the Indigo Days Conversation...post your brilliance here:

http://blueblackblessing.tumblr.com/submit

If you'd like to support the ongoing sacred work of eternal summer of the black feminist mind (including the Indigo Night School coming this Fall!!!) donate one time here:

or on a monthly basis at a rate that makes sense to you!

Indigo Days!!! Black Warrior Healers Unite!!!!

Black warrior healers unite and be reborn! The world will never be the same.

Non-financial and financial contributions welcome!


SCHEDULE OF EVENTS

Thursday June 9th

10am BREAKFAST (the Eleanor at Rigsbee)

10:30-1pm The P-Word and Other Fragile Promises: Movement and Poetics with Aya Hope (the Eleanor at Risgbee)

1pm LUNCH

3-5pm Open Healing Sessions and Stations (Eleanor at Rigsbee)

5:30pm DINNER

6pm Bright: On Clarity and Power Lucille Clifton ShapeShifter Survivor Writing Workshop (the Eleanor at Rigsbee)

(more info about the ShapeShifter Survivor series here: http://blackfeministmind.wordpress.com/survival-school/)

******************************

Friday June 10th

BREAKFAST

8am Waking Up-Cultivating breath, awareness, and embodiment -Yoga with Michelle Johnson (Inspiration Station)

10am Assata graduates from Elementary School!!! (Chorus of praise at E.K. Powe Elementary School Graduation)

LUNCH (discussion topic: rituals and rites of passage)

1pm -3pm Energy Healing Workshop with CC (Inspiration Station)

3pm Journal Making with designer Mariel Eaves (the Eleanor at Rigsbee)

5pm-7pm graduation celebration for our young Indigos Assata and Naeemah!!!!!

DINNER

8pm The Power of Saying No!: A Playlist and Dance Party of Release: Afterparty curated by Moya Bailey (location TBA)

**************************************

Saturday June 11th

BREAKFAST (discussion topic: birth and rebirth: beyond control)

10am Black Women Birthing Resistance Workshop on Indigo and Cotton Root Contraceptive Legacies with Tamika Middleton (Inspiration Station)

LUNCH (discussion topic: fight and flight: re-envisioning survival)

1pm "Embodying Sanctuary: Creating, Holding and Facilitating Sacred Space" with L'erin Asantewa

3pm Wata' Rituals Body Ecology Performance and Workshop (Grace Garden at Durham Central Park)

DINNER (discussion topic: Do You Really Want to Be Well?)

7pm Afro-Surrealist Dark Delicious Divinatory Writing Workshop with Almah Lavon Rice

9pm Optional field trip to Greensboro for Laila Nur's EP release party!!!

***************************************

Sunday June 12th

BREAKFAST (discussion prompt: audre lorde and dream journals)

10: 30 am Activate Your Dreams: Creative Movement/Dance Session with Binahkaye Joy aka Joyism! (Inspiration Station)

12pm -I Know I’ve Been Changed: Queer Black Sunday School with Julia Wallace (Inspiration Station)

BRUNCH

2pm Blues Porch Concert with Laila Nur and Kim Arrington (Inspiration Station)

DINNER (Sunday Dinner...Lex's B-day community potluck!) (Inspiration Station)

7pm Blues Bible Study: Sacred and Secular Healing Podcast with Leah Burke (Inspiration Station)

*****************************************

Monday June 13th

10 am Yoga with Michele Berger

BRUNCH

1pm “Feeling-up Your Emotional Body”- Learning the Sounds and Organs of Emotion with Valencia Wombone

4pm Marvelous Menstruating Moments Workshop with Mya Hunter-SpiritHouse Youth Coordinator (for kids and young people getting ready to menstruate) (Inspiration Station)

DINNER at the Summit Farm!!!!

6pm Collaging as a Healing Practice with Rashida James-Saadiya (location TBA)

*********************************************

Tuesday June 14th

LUNCH

River Walk at Eno River Park

DINNER
5-8pm Lavender Legacies Workshop: Remembering Herbal Remedies (with Kifu Faruq and Afiya Carter)

************************************************

Wednesday June 15th

LUNCH

(full moon) 1pm Butterflies and Bliss with Racheal Derello (North Carolina Museum of Life and Science)

6pm Natural Hair Playdate with Chanel Laguna (Lex's Awesome New Neighbor!!!!) (at the Inspiration Station)

DINNER in Hillsborough and Indigo Seed Starting!

**************************************************

Thursday June 16th

BREAKFAST

LUNCH

Trip to North Carolina Botanical Gardens (Wild Spiked Indigo is their wildflower of the year!!!!)

DINNER

6pm Gentle: On Cultivating Self Love: Lucille Clifton ShapeShifter Survivor Session

This Thursday 6/2 at 6pm Lucille Clifton Rebirth Summer Begins!!!!

Lucille Clifton ShapeShifter Survival School Summer Session 2011!!!!

Thursdays in June

6pm at 204 Rigsbee Ave. #201 in Durham, NC

In honor of the great poet Lucille Clifton, who was also a survivor of childhood sexual abuse, a mother, an artist and self-identified Amazon warrior through her poetry, the Lucille Clifton ShapeShifter Survival School is especially designed for families that are committed to ending childhood sexual abuse and all forms of gendered violence. Informed by Generation 5 and the regional plan of the Atlanta Transformative Justice Collaborative, the ShapeShifter Survival School is part of a holistic process of ending child sexual abuse by creating healing community.

Lucille Clifton Rebirth Summer

2011

F0r 5 Thursdays in Lucille Clifton's birth month of June we will gather as survivors of child sexual and physical abuse and sexual violence and parents and caretakers committed to ending cycles of abuse in our families and communities to do writing activities based on Lucille Clifton's poetry and the ShapeShifter Survivor Rebirth Broadcast video series. (See videos here: http://blackfeministmind.wordpress.com/category/shapeshifting/). Participants in the series will also receive digital mixes of the music we work with to create a sacred space of memory. We can use the digital music mixes at home to activate memories of safety from the group writing space.

Rebirth Summer Thursdays:

Thursday. June 2

Unapologetic: Reclaiming Our Memories and Voices

Thursday, June 9

Bright: On Clarity and Power

Thursday, June 16

Gentle: On Cultivating Self-Love

Thursday, June 23

Futuristic: Towards the World that We Deserve

Thursday, June 30th

Planetary: The Depth and Urgency of Our Healing

For Gil

(almost a gigan for gil scott heron)

we cannot write a eulogy for you
period becomes ellipsis

like battered prophecy in vein
tomorrow claws our collective back
monkey knocks teeth forward holes

soul on shiver smack on cage
choke hold every stolen page

rage to proof that lines do make us bleed
and you were in our heartbeats all along

slice the forearm skin right off the news
we cannot write this eulogy for you

soul on shiver smack on cage
you steal the present into final stage
we memorize your face a fading blue

and we would quit, breathe water, heal for you
but you remain to make us beg the task

be

last


by alexis pauline gumbs

Happy Birthday Sakia Gunn!: A Podcast Celebration

Start your day celebrating the unstoppable, unkillable, unforgetable power of BLACK QUEER YOUTH! Today would be Sakia Gunn's 23rd Birthday and SO in a special Eternal Summer of the Black Feminist Mind/SpiritHouse collaboration and as part of our ongoing leadership development project 18 year old visionary Matthias Pressley and yours truly (Sista Docta Lex) collaborated to create this podcast celebrating the life and legacy of Sakia Gunn. We love you forever Sakia!!!

[audio http://brokenbeautiful.files.wordpress.com/2011/05/sakia-gunn-birthday-podcast-1.mp3]

Direct link: http://brokenbeautiful.files.wordpress.com/2011/05/sakia-gunn-birthday-podcast-1.mp3

Want to see a whole album of pictures of us making the podcast and exuberantly celebrating Sakia?

http://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.894854362522.2423816.103868&l=a798c6bb5a

Want to donate to the ongoing leadership building collaboration between Eternal Summer and SpiritHouse?

Donate one time:

Or sustain:

Don't Have to Do Nothing: Be Free (and still) Be Loved

Y'all. Don't get sick of Lucille Clifton on my account but I swear she just don't run out of brilliant life-saving gifts. So here is another one. In 1985 in the special 15th anniversary issue of Essence Magazine coordinated by Cheryll Y. Greene, Clifton wrote about the true freedom that women can give to each other: "to fail and not be a failure."

When Lucille Clifton, who stunned audiences with the stark clarity of her poetry from countless stages during her lifetime, was a little girl assigned to recite a poem for the Christmas program at her church, she choked. It was not foreshadowing, it was formative. As she stood unable to remember the poem in front of all the church mothers encouraging her and expecting her to perform her mother stood up for her. She felt pressured. She said "I don't wanna." And her mother stood up in front of God and everybody and smiled at her child and she said one small sentence that changes the meaning of life for black girls growing up in patriarchy and capitalism: "She don't have to do nothing she don't want to do."

Can you imagine? Decades later when we were celebrating Lucille Clifton's birthday with her (we didn't know it would be her last) at the Furious Flower poetry center all of us black feminist poets, teachers, daughters gushed with open jealousy at the power and freedom of that statement. Imagine! She don't have to do nothing she don't want to do. So many negatives adding up to the positive clarity that black girls are inherently valuable, love-able, period. When had someone ever stood up and said that for us? When in a world of forced labor, coerced sex, billions of expectations? When had anyone even dared to suggest that we were not valuable because of what we produced, what we created, who we entertained, how well we pretended to be happy? When had we said it for ourselves? don't have to do nothing.

Now I was raised to know that I only have to do two things: stay black, and live. But my interpretation of "stay black and live" has been contorted by internalized capitalism and a system that still judges me based on what my being produces for the market. The refrain that I thought was my heartbeat said "do something do something do something do something" interrupting any stillness with the imperative to produce, to prove, to perform. But here comes Lucille Clifton's mother: she don't have to do nothing.

And how much do we crave that freedom... in the eyes of black people we love who want us to perform blackness in a way that they can more easily consume, in the eyes of non-black people who want the same thing, in the faces of well meaning would be mentors who think we will only be happy with ourselves if we do it their way, in reflections we catch of ourselves in windows thinking we look lost because there is no name for where we are going.

And so today. I need Lucille Clifton's mother, audacious and willing to stand up in front of anyone and say you do not need to stand on a stage to honor God. You do not need to say or do anything in order to be a reflection of divine love. You already are. Even in a puddle at the foot of your bed you are already supreme beautiful unlikely priceless example of the abundance of life. And you know what? Life if so abundant that it places refractions of that same brilliance in all of us, and so there is no need to do it all, there is no need to own brilliance, there is no need to prove and show and compete because life is so abundant that it happens in our honor even when we don't wake up and make it happen.

Who knew Lucille Clifton's mama circa 1940 was an anti-capitalist? Because capitalism would have us believe that we only deserve to be here because of what we produce, and even in our counter-cultures, even in our movements we reproduce the same idea. We only deserve to be here because of what we can produce that other people will buy with their money, time or attention. Our experience of our own lives is secondary, it is only the means of production, it is the products that matter, and unless we make ourselves into both factories and widgets we are not valuable. We believe that. I know I push myself past that belief about every hour on the hour. One of the major lessons of the Mobile Homecoming Experiential Archive Project has been that because of the steep lean (and lien) of capitalism on even our visionary hearts the tendency is to emphasize the documentary film, the photographs, the podcasts, the archived interviews, the presentations...the products over the experience, the priceless opportunity to be present with each other, which is not for sale. Which documents can only gesture towards. Which cannot be sold.

But luckily Lucille Clifton listened to her momma and told us what she said. We can be free and still be loved. We can be still and still be a movement. We are not failures even when we fail. We are life. Miraculous irregardless.

Maybe we can institute Lucille Clifton's mama moments for ourselves and for each other. Maybe we can step in and affirm each other just because. Maybe we can stand up for each other when even our own communities say to us how dare you not be superwoman every second of the day. Maybe we can save the day in our own way in our own language. Nuh-uh. She don't have to do nothing she don't want to do. She don't have to do nothing. And she is still fierce fly and worth of all praise. All of it.

So here is a spare one for each one of you in the time when no one is there to say it, remember that I already said it: you don't have to do nothing to earn my love. nothing to earn all the blessings of the universe. nothing to earn a symphony in ever pore of your skin playing the song of you. nothing to deserve my deepest gratitude for your existence. nothing to earn a place in my heart that you can always come home to. nothing. you already have it. all praise. you have everything.

love always and already,
QBG Lex

P.S. Get ready for a summer filled with opportunities to see the faces of those of us who will scream at the sight of you and open our arms:

*TONIGHT: Young Black Gift: A Birthday Toast to Lorraine Hansberry (@ the Inspiration Station in Durham)
http://www.facebook.com/?ref=home#!/event.php?eid=145740925499014


*Sunday May 22nd 5pm (@ the Inspiration Station in Durham) Rainbow Reclamations: (Blue) Once I Was Pregnant: Abortion, Miscarriage and Rebirth
http://blackfeministmind.wordpress.com/2011/05/10/blue-once-i-was-pregnant-sharing-stories-of-miscarriage-abortion-and-rebirth/

*Friday, May 27th (@ the Rush Center in Atlanta) THE GEMINI JAM/FIST PUMP FRIDAY featuring a performance by the LOST BOIS, gemini juice and dancing all night long!
http://www.facebook.com/?ref=home#!/event.php?eid=215303695165893

*June 9-15 INDIGO DAYS in Durham, NC
http://indigodays.wordpress.com/

*June 23-26 ALLIED MEDIA CONFERENCE in Detroit (featuring the Shawty got Skillshare, the Generations of Brilliance Track and the Visionary Sci-Fi Track)
http://alliedmedia.org/

*Thursdays in June 6pm (@ the Eleanor on Rigsbee in Durham) Lucille Clifton Shapeshifter Sessions: http://blackfeministmind.wordpress.com/2011/04/17/announcing-lucille-clifton-shapeshifter-survival-school-summer-session-2012/

*August 15-19th Juneteenth Freedom Academy Week-long Intensive: Rituals for Educators

*September 1-4th Queerky Black Girls, Mobile Homecoming and ZAMI NOBLA Black Gay Pride Healing and Connection Retreat!!!