Save Us Both

June Jordan, Archival Papers, Radcliffe Institute 1960-2001
Essence: The Magazine for Today’s Black Woman, 1970-1984
Aegis: Magazine on Ending Violence Against Women, Feminist Alliance Against Rape, 1974-1980
Black Renaissance: Papers from the Black Renaissance Convention (South Africa), 1974
Sojourner: A Magazine of Women’s Writing and Visual Art, 1974 (No. 1 Double Issue)
Feminary, 1976-1985
Chrysalis: A Magazine of Women’s Culture 1977-1980
Break De Chains of Legalized U$ Slavery, North Carolina Hard Times Prison Project, 1978
The Winner Names the Age: Collected Writings of Lillian Smith, ed Michelle Cliff, 1978
Off Our Backs Jan-Sept 1979
Frontiers: Journal of the National Women’s Studies Association, 1979-1980
Heresies: A Feminist Publication on Art and Politics, 1979-1981
“Paule Marshall: In Celebration of Our Triumph”, Alexis DeVeaux, Essence ,1979
“Racism and Women’s Studies”, Barbara Smith, Frontiers: A Journal of Women’s Studies Spring 1980
“Piece Work in the University 1970’s Style”, Sharon Josephs Alexander, Frontiers, Spring 1980
“The NWSA (National Women’s Studies Association) Constituency: Evaluation of 1979 Conference Participation, Patricia A. Frech and Barbara Hillyer Davis, Frontiers Spring, 1980.
“Diversity, Fragmentation, Integration: The NWSA Balancing Act, Patricia Frech, Barbara Hillyer Davis, Frontiers, Spring-Summer 1981.
“Finding Our Collective Identity: The 1980 NWSA Conferernce Evaluation”, Patricia Frech and Barbara Hillyer Davis, Frontiers, Spring Summer 1981
Sunbury: An Annual Literary Review 9 & 10, 1980-1981
Mailbongwe ANC Women: Poetry is Also Their Weapon, ed Sono Molefe, 1980.
Staffrider (South Africa), 1980-1992
“Bernice Reagon: B’lieve I’ll Run On...” interview by Alexis DeVeaux, Essence, 1981
“Creating Soul Food: June Jordan”, interview by Alexis DeVeaux, Essence, 1981
“A Song for Billie’, Alexis DeVeaux, Essence 1981
“Zimbabwe Free At Last/Womanfire”, Alexis DeVeaux, Essence 1981
“Southern Africa: Listening for the News”, Alexis DeVeaux, Essence 1982
“Loving the Dark in Me”, Alexis DeVeaux, Essence 1982
Third Woman: Looking East Vol. 1 No. 2, 1982
“Blood Ties” by Alexis DeVeaux, Esssence 1983
“Why Women Rebel: A Comparative Study of South African Women’s Resistance in Bloemfontien and Johannesburg, Journal of Southern African Studies, 1984 (v.10 issue 1)
Many Voices, One Chant: Black Feminist Perspectives (Feminist Review 17), 1984
“Revolutionary Hope: A Conversation between James Baldwin and Audre Lorde”, Essence 1984
Blue Heat: A Collection of Poems and Drawings, Alexis De Veaux, 1985
Gaptooth Girlfriends: The Third Act, (from a Workshop by Alexis De Veaux), The Third Act Press, 1985.
“Transforming Socialist Feminism: The Challenge of Racism”, Kum-Kum Bhavani; Margaret Coulson Feminist Review 23, Summer 1986
Evolution of a Race Riot, Zine ed Mimi Nguyen, 1998?
Sojourner: The Women’s Forum: The Lady is Butch, 1999
Ocho y Media, zine no date
Self Defense, zine by Marissa, (after 1999)
How to Stage a Coup: An Insurrection of the Underground Liberation Army, (comp Zine...no date)
Rage Against #2, zine
I am Intimate with Anger #2, zine by Ann
I’d Sell My Soul to Survive (Discharge #5), zine by Mary,
I am Not a Sell-Out/I am Not a Nigger, Zine by Kerith, no date
Message to the Black Movement, Steering Committee of the Black Liberation Army (no date)
“Rites of Passage: Preparing Youth for Social Change”, Susan Wilcox, Khary Lazarre-White, and Jason Warwin (Brotherhood/SisterSol), Afterschool Matters, Spring 2004.
Ladies Pages: African American Women’s Magazines and the Culture that Made Them, Noliwe Rooks, 2004.
Dancing in the Dark, Caryl Phillips, 2005
Hermana Resist #5 (Under the Yellow Lights) and #6 (In My Defense: On Being), Noemi Martinez, circa 2005-2007
Sisu #3 and #4, Johanna Eeva, circa 2005-2007
Oh So Intense: Online Publication of the Poetry by the People Community Writing Intensive, ed. Ebony Golden, 2007.
Oh So Intense: Online Publication of the Poetry by the People Community Writing Intensive, ed. Ebony Golden, 2007 (ohsointense.wordpress.com)

June Jordan was a badass. Even her dad said she had "thuglike tendencies". Reading through her letters at the Radcliffe Institute this past week I noticed that time and time again Jordan wrote angry letters to lazy, racist or badminded publications about their misuse of her work and dared them "just publish this letter, and save us both the trouble." Damn.

And June never pretended that she wasn't a fighter. So while the (wonderful attentive) archivist notes that some people complain that June Jordan was "difficult". I say...June Jordan was a tough loving teacher, insisting that everything she wrote...especially a letter to the editors...was a teaching moment. And a dare. None of the recipients of her angriest letters ever printed her missives about their shortcomings in their pages...because her words were too strong, too true to brave to close. June Jordan teaches us that every letter (now i mean it in the sense of the characters that make up words) must be a threat to the status quo. Maybe this is outcast publication at its best. Jordan's poems and essays themselves literally tell readers to "be afraid" because "i must become a menace to my enemies", but these unpublishable letters do something else...engender an unease, a privatized shame, a twist that says...this is what you own, your cowardice.

So it makes sense (to me) that Jordan only sent letters like this to white folks and white-run publications. In one hundred letters to Essence not one rips someone a new subscriptions (and we all know that Essence has issues...no pun intended), but somehow (though Jordan rewrote her contracts with them to ensure that she, not the magazine, had control over whether or not her words would be "reproduced"(that's the contract language)...Jordan had a different investment in that black male owned, black woman edited black woman audience geared space. I suspect that her inside knowledge of the tireless work executive editor Cheryll Greene and poetry/contributing editor Alexis DeVeaux did to counter the consumerist, tourist producing beauty sell of the magazine with a broad-based, sincere and radical diasporic consciousness based on the power of black women and words...might have had something to do with it. So in some cases a letter is a love thing, a way to remind yourself who you love...not a threat but a thread to follow towards hope.

So left for me to learn is how do I temper my temper and choose my words (as I embark on six months of letter writing today with the primary act of stealing fancy envelopes today)? Who do I remind not to touch me and who do I embrace despite their glaring contradictions? (Because I am seriously considering forcing every person at my university to fear me so much that they'll never get close enough to assault me and be rewarded for it. Because I am a very very angry black girl when I think about how my school pays rapists more than teachers...) Are either of these things (papercuts and hugs) sustainable? Do they cancel each other out? Remember June Jordan was a small bodied youthful spirit who stayed young died love, suffered illness all her life and finally died of breast cancer. June Jordan is someone who should be here now. And though she is here now (and I don't resent the work it takes to conjure her) I'm heavier for mourning her loss. Where does all the badass energy go? Does it build up fences,draw sharp lines in sand? Does it fortify a safe space for us to stand? Does it remind those who slight us what they already know...that we are smarter than them and they're scared? Or is it an act of justifed theft, energy and righteousness stolen back to be shuttled into our own growing dreams. June Jordan was part of a group called the Sisterhood (along with Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, Ntozake Shange etc. etc.) that dreamed about making something called Kizzy Enterprises...Ntozake Shange was going to put it in her house, and they were going to publish autonomously and they were going to be funded completely by committed black allies and they were going to republish lost black classics and they were going to write for and as the oppressed black masses and they were going to meet up with the Flamboyant Ladies theatre group and end nuclear war over brunch in Alexis DeVeaux's sunroom and they were going to.... save us all.

Home is a Trip: Out of this World

The Keys: The Official Organ of the League of Colored People (edited by Una Marson), 1933
Spare Rib, 1979-1984
For Ourselves: From Women's Point of View: Our Bodies and Sexuality, Anja Muelenbelt, 1981.
Conditions ("Feminist Literary Journal with an Emphasis on Writing by Lesbians") 1982-1988
Girls are Powerful: Young Women's Writings from Spare Rib, 1982
FAN (Feminist Art News) 1983-1985
Gen: An Anti-Racist, Anti-Sexist Education Journal, 1983-1988
I Is a Long Memoried Woman, Grace Nichols, 1983
A Dangerous Knowing: Four Black Women Poets Barbara Buford, Gabriela Pearse, Grace Nichols, Jackie Kay, 1984.
Echo: Works by Women Artists 1850-1940, Maud Sulter, 1991.
Syrcas, Maud Sulter, 1994.
Jeanne Duval, A Melodrama, Maud Sulter, 2003.
The Known World, Edward P. Jones, 2003.
Sing, Whisper, Shout, Pray: Feminist Visions for A Just World, M. Jacqui Alexander, Lisa Albrecht, Sharon Day and Mab Segrest (eds), 2003.
Soul Power: Culture, Radicalism and the Making of A U.S. Third World Left, Cynthia A. Young, 2006.
The Darker Nations: A People's History of the Third World, Vijay Prashad, 2007.
AND
The Allied Media Conference in Detroit Michigan
and the United States Social Forum in Atlanta Georgia (as supplemental and inassimilable texts)

What I really learned this week was never to return from a powerful, overwhelming and sleep depriving event in Detroit with only a few hours before you need to drive to a powerful, overwhelming and sleep depriving event in Atlanta. Especially if (thanks to a rare mistake by your loving and usually perfect partner) you are actually accidentally homeless...during those not even 20 hours at "home". (My girlfriend locked all of our keys in the house...our landlord was out of town...the locksmith was closed...where was Una Marson when I needed her so!)

Luckily, (in addition to the surplus inspiration I received from the badass women of color bloggers and young hip hop activists I met in the big D) I had a good reason to stay awake during the drive to Atlanta (lengthened by rain, rubbernecking and rush hour): Mama Nayo. I had the honor of driving from present home to former home with native ATLien, black arts south heroine, and loving elder friend Nayo Watkins. Our conversation which ranged from the meaning of "community research" to the difference between growing up in Atlanta during periods of racial and class-based segregation framed my entire trip home (oh that word again).

For updates on the poems and polemics I shared at the Allied Media Conference and the United States Social Forum click the appropriate links on the BrokenBeautiful Press mainpage, and let me know what you think. This is the place where I start (again) figuring out my relationship to the texts above in terms of my life here (below).

My question, subliminally pre-invoked by these readings and reiterated by my overdose on conference attendance is this: How many world are there? Especially in regards to the work that Young and Prashad do (often in contradiction...and certainly with different scopes) to define the 3rd World, I wonder how many worlds exist at once.

Many worlds are small ones. This past week I have travelled through one small world that is the US based people of color led movement for radical social change. We all know each other. I hope that makes us a movement. I hope that makes us accountable. I hope that helps us succeed. And I have visited another small world where black lesbians in their fifties talk about how they used to go dancing with Marlon Riggs, and how Pat Parker helped them move, and how Audre Lorde noticed they were the only ones nodding in agreement at her public speeches and how I should know their daughters since we all went to school together and never ever spoke. And there is the smaller and marginalized world of our healing, holding it's space as its relevance moves towards need. And there is the small network of radical women of color bloggers who directed more people to my website than I even imagined. And there is the small world of my community of survivors in healing, making smaller worlds still as we embrace each other. And then there is the you that might be reading this blog. Small, small, world in which to dance.

And if these are just some of the small worlds where my soul has stretched by, then how many worlds must there be. And what do these worlds have to do with mapping (after the official launchings of activist networks MyBloc (www.mybloc.net) and Future 5000 (www.future5000.org) and that other map launched by sistersong and of course google maps making it easy for someone to be looking at my roof right now. What do all of the small worlds that matter to me have to do with the earth or the planet and with knowing and with fear. At the Building a Queer Left meeting that Southerners on New Ground and Queers for Economic Justice put on someone suggested that it would be great to make an accessible map of all the progressive or radical queer organizations or people (or cells?) in the United States. And everyone agreed it would be wonderful to have that kind of GPS and no one said that was scary. No one reminded the group that lots of people still want to kill us, and that many of us, especially immigrants right now need to remain unfound. No one mentioned the TV series heroes and the tragedies caused when the map of the supernaturally gifted got into the wrong kindred hands. No one said that. And that no one was supposed to have been me.

The contradiction is: I want to know. I benefit from knowing people working on radical projects all over the world, and I don't begrudge anyone the luxury of what I have learned through accident and lust, but when the world becomes a globe, infinitely knowable and programmed it's the small one, it is us who can be hurt first, fastest and in the quietest ways. Our small worlds are not by any means safe, if only because they are none of them only, none of them self-contained, none of them disconnected, none of them whole or home completely. So while I find myself making a map through time and space of black feminist publishing, of people who purposely left treasure maps, of people who wanted to be found (by me) even after they suffered deportation, and exile, imprisonment, and death sentences, I think I am also making a small paperlined world, lining it with words and hoping that maybe I can hide here and sleep. Just for now.
love,
lex

Changed Waters Evaporating or Breathing is Believing

“Coalition Politics: Turning the Century”, Bernice Johnson Reagon, West Coast Women’s Music Festival, 1981.
“Mr. Close-friend-of-the-family pays a visit whilst everyone else is out”, charcoal by Sonia Boyce, circa 1983
As A Black Woman, Maud Sulter, 1985 (Akira Press)
Black Women Talk Poetry, BlackWomantalk Collective (Da Chong, Olivette Cole Wilson, Bernadine Evaristo, Gabriela Pearse), 1987,
“Calliope”, (a gilt framed self-portait photograph by and of Maud Sulter shown above), 1991
Shadowboxing: Representations of Black Feminist Politics Joy James, 1999.
Pedagogies of Crossing: Meditations on Feminism, Sexual Politics Memory and the Sacred, M. Jaqui Alexander, 2005.
“Southerners on New Ground: Our Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Community”, Mandy Carter in What Lies Beneath: Katrina, Race and the State of the Nation, 2007.
“Political Literacy and Voice” Joy James in What Lies Beneath: Katrina, Race and the State of the Nation, 2007.
“Radical Social Change: Searching for a New Foundation”, Adjoa Florencia Jones de Ameida in The Revolution Will Not be Funded (an INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence Anthology), South End Press, 2007.
“Are the Cops in Our Heads and Hearts?”, Paula X. Rojas, in The Revolution Will Not be Funded (an INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence Anthology), South End Press, 2007.
“Non-Profits and the Autonomous Grassroots”, Eric Tang in The Revolution Will Not be Funded (an INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence Anthology), South End Press, 2007.
“On Our Own Terms: Ten Years of Radical Community Building With Sista II Sista”, Nicole Burrowes, Morgan Cousins, Paula X. Rojas, and Ije Ude in The Revolution Will Not be Funded (an INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence Anthology), South End Press, 2007.

“Welcome”, Loretta Ross at SisterSong 10th Anniversary Celebration “Let’s Talk About Sex” May 31-June 3rd 2007.
“Your Human Rights are My Human Rights: Building a Reproductive Justice Movement Together”, Byllye Avery
“Reproductive Oppression and Reproductive Justice for Women of Color”, Dorothy Roberts
“Self-Help: Speak Truth With Power”, Dazan Dixon Diallo
“Integrating HIV/AIDS and Reproductive Justice Movements Globally”, Dazan Dixon Diallo (SisterLove Inc)
“The Future of Sex and Reproductive Technologies”, Sujatha Jesudason (Center for Genetics and Society)
“Intersex Human Rights Issues”, Emi Koyama
“Myth of Overpopulation and Dangerous Contraceptives”, Cara Page (Deeper Waters Productions and Committee on Women, Population and the Environment)
“Organizing Youth at the Domincan Women’s Development Center, Claudia De la Cruz
“Valuing Young Motherhood”, Benita Miller (Brooklyn Young Mother’s Collective)
“If Another World is Possible, Another U.S. is Necessary—Moving Forward to the U.S. Social Forum”, Jerome Scott (Project South)
“Sex Work and Economic Justice”, Juhu Thukral (Sex Workers Project @ Urban Justice Center), Erika Derkas and Gennifer Hirano (Sex Workers Outreach Project Los Angeles)
“Undivided Rights: Women Of Color and Reproductive Justice”, Jael Silliman, Marelene Gerber Fried, Loretta Ross, Elena Gutierrez
“The Power of Stories: Depo Provera and Women of Color” Committee on Women and Population and Luz Rodriquez
“From the Birth Room to the Bedroom: Decolonizing Women from the Imprint of Violence (The Butterfly Approach)”
“The Erotics of Childbirth”, Luz Lesero
all at SisterSong 10th Anniversary Celebration “Let’s Talk About Sex” May 31-June 3rd 2007.

In Guyana they believe that ancestors move in wind, take us over quick like that, fill us with the power of the universe and more (the multiverse perhaps). And when M. Jacqui Alexander explains that we don't walk alone, that we walk accompanied in a way that makes our bodies sites of memory, talking books, that spoils our souls from ever being bought, that opens our mouth to possession that is already communal, I hear that. We hear that. We know. Last night while I finished reading M. Jaqui Alexander's Pedagogies of Crossing, Oya took me over (took me again?) into sounds of recognition that probably made Jurina (sitting next to me calculating statistics at the time) wonder since when had Duke library been lending out 350 page hardcover erotica. But I mean it. When Alexander shared that her teacher described Oya as being able to "kiss you with a light breeze" I recognized a possession that has had me all along.
Last week I wondered about superpowers and living forever and as if in response (as if being in the presence of almost a thousand brilliant, fierce, committed beautiful women including my very own mother at the SisterSong Conference in Chicago were not enough!) this huge book by Jacqui Alexander that against good advice I lugged along the journey holds a name for this act of transgenerational remembering, of an archive in the body not coded in genomes, of an intellectual act of faith, theorizing as an existential act of (simply put) superpowers and living forever. What a model for sharing, as Cara Page spoke completely habituated by Audre Lorde about how we risk our lives to love to transform the world with the ample erotic us, and how capitalism names that overpopulation...as if it were the millions and not the few wasting 80% of the resources. As Luz Lesero spoke rebirth into this same Audre in her workshop on erotic childbirthing. As the midwives of the Tewa Birthing Center spoke of the Butterfly approach that splits open worlds that remain connected into thousand year histories in which we are small and growing. As heroes in the reproductive justice movement are mourned as 14 year old urban butterflies make group poems...the dead are born and born and born.
And we thought coalition in the present was hard. And we thought relating across organizational affiliations, callings and practices was difficult, was humbling, was taking too long! But we are relating across planes, across centuries, across death, across oceans even now. Even right now June, Audre, Claudia, Olive, Ida, and Ella crowd into my fingers, rush forward to fill this next breath when it opens. And we thought resources were scarce! I feel like my face has smacked into the wall of infinity and moved through because it was air...it was air all along. I am learning the meaning of a map without conquest, I am swallowing the depth of what I almost bartered cheap. Revolutions cannot be funded...just as much as Gil Scott Heron cannot die alone. Revolutions cannot be funded and we would sell our souls, chain our freedoms to money made to weigh the flight of our porous bodies down? I cried during many moments of the SisterSong conference, but clarity stung most when I learned that the same funders who pay for this beautiful conference in this bad-ass hotel...who paid for my mother and I to attend towards our futures...were paying for our knowing with residuals that they made off of testing birth control at 20 times the stregnth, of inserting depo provera prototypes without consent, of sterlizing and sterlizing until the elementary schools had to start closing, simply put for raping women in Puerto Rico and Jamaica of all the generations they might have been holding to pass on. Birth control drug sales are big business...big enough to fund the Reproductive Justice movement off the crumbs leftover.

So when I say we are connected that means everything. That means as much as I am open to joy I am open to pain 100 generations worth using me to change the water. That means if we are divine, if we are forever, we are also complicit, we are trading in soul. As the Sista said "Capital is not only all around us in the society we live in. It is also in what we value...in what we believe is possible." Who knew that Oya had been sitting here all along (Maud Sulter knew through the name Calliope)? Who knew that Oya had been circulating through me all this time...hoping I would continue to give her away, to open to faith, hoping I would sell off no more of our power than necessary. Hoping that sacrifice wouldn't scar me passed passing on all that she is pushing through.
Ashe.

Span: How to Live (forever)

Salt of the Earth (film-1953)
Black Voice: Popular Paper of Black Unity and Freedom Party (1972-1985)
Anti-Apartheid Movement Women’s Committee Newsletter (1981-1985)
Common Differences: Conflicts in Black and White Feminist Perspectives by Gloria Joseph and Jill Lewis, 1981
Black and Immigrant Women Speak Out II: Women Count, Count Women’s Work (June 16-17, 1984)
As A Black Woman, Maud Sulter, 1985
Heart of the Race: Black Women’s Lives in Britian, Beverly Bryan, Stella Dadzie and Suzanne Scafe
Watchers and Seekers: Creative Writing by Black Women, ed Rhonda Cobham and Merle Collins, (London 1987, New York 1988)
Motherlands: Black Women’s Writing from Africa, the Caribbean and South Asia, ed Susheila Nasta, 1991 London , 1992 US
The Atlantic Sound, Caryl Phillps, 2000
A Distant Shore, Caryl Phillips, 2003
Transnational America, Inderpal Grewal , 2005
Heroes, NBC (2006-)

I've always been drawn to superheroes. Maybe I identify with the need to create a secret identity, so the real superpowers can be safe. Maybe I know what it feels like to protect your loved ones from a realness that's as much a burden as it is a miracle. Maybe it's the tights. Either way my, since my sister and I watched a whole season of the NBC TV show heroes (derivative from X-Men, with the sexy-science scare validity of the human genome project) I have been thinking about superheroes. I don't think that I am a more evolved version of my ancestors (if anything the opposite), but (inspired by the cheerleader whose body recovers from everything, and whose mind recovers from an attempted rape murder that her classmate inflicts on her) there is something that I have to change.
Maybe Barbara Smith was speaking on an evolutionary scale when she said that she wanted to see if was possible to be a black lesbian and live to tell about it. If so, I am speaking on an evolutionary scale now, when I say, I want to use my one life to prove that there is such a thing as a black girl braced against the word a real superwoman (despite Michele Wallace) who lives this way (to be elaborated shortly) and keeps on living. For Olive Morris, bad-ass flat-squatting bookshop-opening back-upping superwoman who faced sexual violence for resisting other people's arrests, dead from cancer at 27 but alive now because we travel through time. For Claudia Jones internationalist booklist-giving, carnival-founding, young socialist party newsletter-editing Mcarthy-flouting superhero who made walls fall and built gardens with three magic words "black. people. everywhere." dead at 49 from a heart-busting stroke, but alive now because we travel through time (and because Carole Boyce Davies insists). For June, for Audre, for Nellie, for Barbara, for every blackwoman genuis fighting or sending remittances to cancer and heart disease as we speak, there must be some way to save the day.
What kind of magic is required, what is the spell, where is the secret switch that does both things (on heroes we have the mother who splits herself into two to defend herself from sexual abuse...evidently watching NBC fiction is better than watching NBC "news" for those of us who would say NO to sexual violence..but I digress). Where is the magic book and when we find it which parts should we say outloud? Which parts should we write over? What is the time travel tool that I (maker and taker of books) can weild? My real question is what is the relationship between the anthology...used and reused tool of black women in struggle to imagine that they might live forever, to reach backwards into existence...and the archive...attempted and denied and opening in 2007...and the letter to be found. And what can my relationship to all of these things be such that Olive Morris never dies AND such that it doesn't cost me cancer to break open this hostile protal in a deadly institution and hold her?
In other words: WHAT WILL OUR (S)HERO(ES) DO NEXT?
Stay tuned.

for gil

for gil
(an almost gigan created at the Poetry by the People Community Writing Intensive)

we cannot write a eulogy for you
period becomes ellipsis

like battered prophecy in vien
tomorrow claws our collective back
money 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

Translating "Black": From English to England

Finding a Voice: Asian Women in Britian, Amrit Wilson, 1978
Black Women:Bringing it All Back Home, Margaret Prescod-Roberts and Norma Steele, 1980
The Fat Black Woman Poems, Grace Nichols(pictured above), 1984
The Final Passage, Caryl Phillips, 1985
Strangers and Sisters: Women, Race and Immigration, ed Selma James, 1985
Watchers and Seekers, eds Rhonda Cobham and Merle Collins, 1988
Let it Be Told: Black Women Writers in Britian, ed Lauretta Ngcobo, 1988
"The Future of Reproductive Choice for Poor Women and Women of Color", Dorothy E. Roberts, 1990
Passion: Discourses on Blackwomen's Creativity, ed Maud Sulter, 1990
Don't Ask Me Why: An Anthology of Short Stories by Black Women eds. Blackwomantalk Collective, 1991
Kindness to Children, Joan Riley, 1992 (first book published by a women's press in the UK)
Young, Female and Black, Heidi Safia Mizra, 1992
Black Women's Writing, ed Gina Wisker, 1993
From Homebreakers to Jailbreakers: Southall Black Sisters, ed Rahila Gupta, 2003
The Aesthetics of Superfluity, Achille Mbembe, 2004
Katrina, Black Women and the Deadly Discourse on Black Poverty in America, Barbara Ransby, 2006
"Say it Loud: Perspectives on the Black Left", Left Turn Magazine, 2007


Isn't it wonderful when you finally actually see the area of inquiry that your work has been implying all along. Rather like being struck on the forehead by the heel of your own hand. Maybe my first clue should have been my choice to get a PhD in English. Maybe it should have been the "anglophone Caribbean" elements of my work. Maybe it should have been the way I kept buying novels by black british women writers and gifting them to the women in my family. Maybe it should have been the fact that as we all know by now this project is about my mother and grandmother (alongside the wider possibility of women coming before in a way that produces this me) and my mother was born and raised IN bloody England. You get the point. I should have known that my work had something to do with black women in England. But I didn't notice. In fact I had already booked a ticket to London before I realized that the development of "black feminisms" in Britian was a crucial site of my research. So there, to those of you who think quick and smart mean the same.
So my slow dance with destiny had led me to this set of weeks. At the end of the semester, ostensibly done with my qualifyng exams, deep in the production of a national event to end sexual violence, enjoying a visit from my mother...and reading frantically twenty books about black feminist activism and literary production in Britain from the New Cross Massacre to the new and violent terrifying anti-terrorist now. And despite this prelude and the radical inbetweeness of it, this reading turned out to be right on time. Not only does the interesting work of English Collective of Prostitutes, Housewives in Dialogue, Wages Due Lesbians and the other members of the Wages for Housework campaign push and cushion my thoughts about the domestic as an analytic through which to critique diaspora and nation-formation (and cultural nationalism), not only does almost every anthologized black woman writer have a critique of the publishing industry..and indeed what it means to be anthologized at all, and not only does Maud Sulter have the ill afro and small build that makes me think I could impersonate her blissfully, BUT this set of readings has ALSO helped my clarify why exactly it is that with a theoretical archive that does not come close to staying within the English language and an obsession with reading in every language I can find, my literary--primary archive which I thought was just about blackness, or black people or something...is so persistantly Anglophone.
As usual, Brent Edwards is helpful here. While at first I worried that a project like mine, so influenced by Edwards work in the Practice of Diaspora of developing a print archive and a concept of translation or articulation in which diaspora and relationship more generally has to be something in translation that my mono-linguistic sources...just weren't diasporic enough. But this week of reading makes it clear that although articulations of black feminism and solidarity IN ENGLISH are circualating between the United States, Canada, the UK, the Anglophone Caribbean, and South Africa the term "Black" does not describe the same thing at all when one moves from one of these places to the other. So alongside, (African-American, West Indian, East Indian, Afro-Caribbean, Coloured, Indian, Asian) in all of these locations is an investment in the term BLACK. Not just by women who were speaking across different regional definitions of blackness...but who were also MOVING between these different regions and taking on Black as a mode of relationship strategically...and in black ink over and over again. If I am interested in what it means to be black then one place to look is the untranslatability, incommensurability of this term in what would want to be a black diaspora, but is not quite...as long as black and african are not quite synonymous.
So here I go into the world with this. First to Black Lily a film and music festival in Philadelphia for "unsung" musicians and filmakers (black?) and then across the pawned to visit my sister and to track down these publications, periodicals, pamphlets. To (w)it.
yours---

A Spelling Lesson

for this and every survivor

drop
is a four-letter word
an instruction after catching fire
a movement behind stop
a command we must memorize
and tell ourselves
if we would be safe

drop
is what we do to the kids
at school, at practice, at auntie's
training for a next that will keep them (running)
warning that they will not be at home anywhere
treason required by our other jobs

drop
is what the dj plays
what the hypeman says
the entrance of the beat(ing)
stretching our skin like a place to call
drowning our knees like a new heartbeat

and today
drop
is what my stomach does
is a frame for the rain
is the shape of the blood
that would seek to be the last word
as if we weren't students as well

but we know how to spell

so when i see D-R-O-P
dropped open in front of me
like it was new(s)
all i do is add you
all of bright breaking you
all of impossibly speaking
light leaking
you

and the next word is yours

P-R-O-U-D

love always,
alexis

Producing the Comparative: Imagining Community Where there is None

Final Passage, Caryl Phillips, 1985
Native Speaker, Chang-Rae Lee, 1995
Beyond Miranda's Meanings, Sylvia Wynter, 1995
TUFF, Paul Beatty, 2000
High Tech and High Heels in the Global Economy: Women, Work and Pink Collar Identities in the Caribbbean, Carla Freeman, 2000
"Contested Histories: Las Hijas de Cuauhtemoc, Chicana Feminisms and Print Culture in the Chicano Movement", Maylei Blackwell, 2003
"Chicana Print Culture and Chicana Studies: A Testimony to the Development of Chicana Feminist Culture", Anna NeitoGomez, 2003
"Reproduction and Misegenation on the Borderlands: Mapping the Maternal Body of Tejanas", Rosa Linda Fergoso, 2003
The Nick of Time: Politics, Evolution and the Untimely, Elizabeth Grosz, 2004
"Black Panthers,Red Guardsand Chinamen: Constructing Asian American Identity Through Performing Blackness, 1969-1972", Daryl J. Maeda, 2005



Since I do believe that what Maylei Blackwell call "print culture modes of community" create relationship where there was simply trauma and desire, lack and need, and since I act like this also applies to the internet, this collection of readings is about how community can be produced and what the limitations of my imagination must be.

I read TUFF because someone mentioned it in the Afro/Asian Encounters anthology that I read last week and it seems to me (in the spirit of Paul Beatty's first novel) to use humour to subvert widely held expectations of what community can be. Through what seems like a pretty broad but detailed mastery of cultural markers (first in LA and now in East Harlem) Beatty exposes the place where culinary, street artistic, criminal, literary and politica creativities meet. (A headphone junkie spitting shakespearean oratory before creating his own graffitti written poems...an overweight african-american who can order any food or drink in spanish and who finds a strange home within the edgy formalism of sumo wrestling...A hood-rich, money market investing, disabled d-boy...a black rabbi who loves simon and garfunkle etc). What I love about Beatty is that as long as there is something to expressed (especially against the backdrop of death and violence that his main characters) subcultural positions are in a constant process of meeting and transforming each other. However in our conversation about the anthology Afro/Asian Encounters in the Race/Place/Space working group, it became clear that imagining the meeting places of different racialized subcultural groups is much easier than accounting honestly for the places where members of different subcultures capitalizes on each others differential oppressions which is itself still easier than creating lasting coalitions that transcend single-issue moments. I have faith, however, that Beatty is onto and part of something. Subcultural processes, because of the embattled energy that it takes to even imagine that type of community (the risky act of passionately directing oneself towards no known reward) is an energy of production...or i should say is a dynamic that has no choice but to be in the making. At the feminist theory workshop in response to Hortense Spillers' talk on citizenship Wahneema Lubiano suggested that we focus on the dynamics of relation in struggle as opposed to focusing on some kinda product...like citizenship...or maybe even the imagined community in which there can be a secure citizen. So then my reading of Tuff, and Native Speaker and Maeda's article look less for either a solid constituency of multi-culturally literate East Harlem Residents, or an immigrant community/subjectivity that could result in a mayor or a vanguard position that all communities of color could apply in concert and instead dwell in what the authors actually give...which is a mode of production in which figuring out how to speak in the public face of difference produces and changes our relationships to each and every other which is every one.

Reading my own project about the way in which Black Feminist publishing initiatives may have sought to produce an audience through this attention means that I have to be careful about not simply reproducing Anderson, or more importantly not necessarily producing what Anderson says print culture produces which is the nation. I want to distinguish that mode of production and relation and communication engaged by those who i am sometimes calling black feminists didn't couldn't and didn't want to produce a nation. Not just because they were reacting to cultural nationalisms that subjected them to violence, but also because they were writing about what it meant to be in public (with so much at stake..not least their bodies), and also because they were being about what it meant to make something (with so much at stake, not least moynihan). So pivot and squirm on Maylei Blackwell's to use the term "republication" to accurately describe the way that chicana feminists printed conference proceedings and used each others articles to create leverage, contrast and inspiration in different community contexts because with its resonance that word seems to suggest that what we produce when we do that is the a republic. Which maybe I think has already been hijacked too many times as a term, but which I also think could be demanding a different non-national designation through the consequences of her use.

So basically I am saying that Elizabeth Grosz is onto something when she says that we are making our bodies and concepts out of the unpredictable but continual approach of difference through time. The radical women of color bloggers that I align with (who all write about sexual violence, who all guarantee my eternal love through their brave badass committment to being in public with that which seeks to shame us) are not simply applying the strategies of the earlier feminist publishers I always cite....but are also drawing on engagements with punk culture, with a diy ethic, with a techie solipsism and a wiki reach for co-creation. Which is to say that a special journal issue is not the same as a blog carnival and an international women's day march is not the same a the day that we all blog about sexual violence. Even the significances of conferences in the juxtaposed moments changes. The concepts emerging in our modes of production change (us). Change what and how and if we make (sense to each other?love out of each one?). And maybe this is what I need to say to get myself out of the misanthropic dissappointed place that Caryl Phillips' The Final Passage left me, not because the book wasn't beautiful...but because it was so effectively about the disappointments that make sustainable relationships so unlikely so necessary and urgent. This is where I started. Which is to say you may never read this. But I need you (too).
love,
lex

Womb as Blindspot: Reproduction as Usual

The Womb of Space: The Cross Cultural Imagination, Wilson Harris, 1983
"Sound Effects: Tricia Rose interviews Beth Coleman", 2001
"Black Secret Technology: Detroit Techno and the Information Age", Ben Williams, 2001
"Tales of an Asiatic Geek Girl: Slant from Paper to Pixels" Mimi Nguyen, 2001
"Bandung is Done: Passages in AfroAsian Epistemology" Vijay Prashad, 2006
"Complicating Racial Binaries: Asian Canadians and African Canadians as Visible Minorities", Eleanor TY, 2006
"One People, One Nation? Creolization and Its Tensions in Trinidadian and Guyanese Fiction, Lourdes Lopez Ropero, 2006
"Chutney, Mestissage and Other Mixed Metaphors: Reading Indo Caribbean Art in Afro Caribbean Contexts", Gita Rajan, 2006
"Performing Postmodernist Passing: Nikki S. Lee, Tuff and Ghost Dog in Yellowface/Blackface", Cathy Covell Wagner, 2006
"Toward a Black Pacific", Gary Okihiro, 2006

As usual, reading breeds reading. After reading these essays (and monograph) I ordered Paul Beatty's TUFF from the library..and I'm halfway through it already. Not to say the real sick truth which is that it seems that the way that I am celebratingt he fact that I have passed my prelim exams and am technically free from the reading list that I have been reproducing for you here by exuberantly creating another reading list. Lilly library had a crate of books waiting for me before the ink had even dried on my committee's signatures. So yes. It's sick. I am obsessed with books and no one knows how I got this way. Or do they?
It's my use of the term "breeds" unqualified in the first sentence of this entry that should tip you off. I'm up to something. As usual. Breeding as usual. What interests me about this set of readings is the way that feminized space becomes the place where a meeting of cultures--even creolization perhaps---can happen on terms that are somehow no longer gendered...even though they are happening...supposedly in my womb...which is the ocean, which makes the nation, and a profit somehow. Right. So in the case of Wilson Harris's book the space of possible cultural mixing is a womb. Though I am intrigued by this idea of making space through relationships I am confused about how Harris's analysis of Ellison's Invisible Man requires that the protagonist be Anansi and Odysseus struggling through episodic voyages introduced by a feminized (and he admits)debased muse. I am not arguing that this observation is incorrect. Unfortunately one of my favorite books (Invisible Man) and one of my least favorite movies (Hustle and Flow) share the same narrative crutch. The possibility of democracy is based on the ability of a man to express himself (every man gets a verse right), but somehow this journey towards democracy depends on the availability of a slappable woman, usually as the bridge across which men of different cultures can meet. (Aside: I mean think about it Triple Six Mafia actually got an academy award (even THEY thought they were being punked) for "It's Hard Out Here for Pimp"--and OF COURSE the majority white men who are members of the academy voted for that, because they understand. Maintaining a violent patriarchy in which the bodies of all women are property is HARD. It requires constant violence and the work through which lies about equality become believable. Of course 36M is also really is being punked (pun(k) intended, because in that economy violence against women is just the sketching pad for the violence against the feminized black man and feminizable everyone else. Maybe it helps if you wear bright colors, hang out in miami and stay high. But you best believe if Ashton can appropriate the word punk into a household term, an academy award only makes you a houseslave (sorry Forrest Whitaker, Jaimie Foxx, Halle Berry and Officer Denzel...but you know I'm right---Hattie McDaniels backs me up), and they will use the violence you earn on my body to enslave you too...so can we just stop?)

Anyway, as I am saying I don't disagree with Harris's observation that cross cultural imaginings between men (or the action of hybrid greco-yoruba man creations)
happens in Ellison over the debased body of some woman everytime. I am just asking why that's okay. And not only does Harris seenm to portray this as a necessary and minor evil in his reading of Ellison...his entire thesis (that there is such a thing as the womb of space...where the cross-cultural imagination is produced) seems to say that this is the way that it should be! Harris doesn't exclude women from his analysis, he doesn't debase the work of female novelist to uplift the work of men, he doesn't do any of the things that during the same period Ishmael Reed and Amiri Baraka were engaged in...but in the version of the academy that I would want to create that is not grounds for any award. What I am saying is that brilliant as Harris's analysis is, the thing that I am left with is that "womb" remains an available and unproblematic term for him to use. Some part of a body of a woman remains neutral as a space, operizational as a machine (see Benitez-Rojo) and this is a problem.

Maybe this availability of the disembodied womb is related to Ty's ability to assume the nation in an analysis of race in Canada that while seeking to displace the black white binary, produces a US Canada binary that only reinscribes the hegemony of the US in deciding what race really means (which is expendability---Foucault would say...which is the production of death---Mbembe would say after). And though Bandung is supposed to be Done, a creolization that can generate a unified nation is the best case scenario in the Ropero even though one could argue that the logic of nation provides no technology for transcending imagined/inherited? heritages...in fact allit providesisa narrative in which some kind of supremacy must narrated on racial terms or otherwise. Does the nation..when feminized (so usually) become another womb in which creolization must happen? And in that case does this strange ability for a womb to operate on its own without any human being being invoked pass on to the nation in a way that erases the culpability of the state that narrates the nation through its structural violences? Does this same thing happen with an ocean that can be feminized...the atlantic, the pacific...whichever it is most convenient to normalize penetration through? My baseline question is what kind of spatial production is the invocation of the disembodied womb enabling? What would happen if we were to make space for the possibility of women, not just reproducing whatever men decide to insert into them, not just creating a landscape upon which men of different cultures meet..made one through the magic of noticed and excluded gender difference, but space where women could actually make anything, make something.
Thus the importance of Mimi Nguyen's piece on zine production from paper to pixels. Nguyen includes some of the hatemail that she recieved through which white men tried to deny her process of creating something by bringing the conversation back to their descriptions of her as exotic, rapeable, site for their continued masculinization of themselves through imagined and enacted violence. Nguyen herself is actually more interested in interrogating the means of production, denying the logic in which she would be the means through which the status quo could be reproduced. Nguyen is interested in what the difference between a love object called copy machine (the access to which she negotiates sometimes through the false possibility of sex) and a love object (or less loveable object) called laptop means. What, she asks, is the difference between stolen copywritten images and stolen pieces of html code...google searched images transplanted for other uses. Which is a good question, similar to Laura Wexler's question at the Feminist Theory Workshop this past weekend about what the difference between photography as metaphorized through light and flash and the now digital photographic relationship means. These are questions that I will show my love for by reasking and not answering completely. One thing that all these questions require is an attention to the act of making and the politics of production (see what beth coleman says about dj pedagogies)...so I'll only know if I get to make stuff..with you.
love,
lex (your official phd candidate...what what!)

Presence, Prophecy and Reproduction: (Y)our Words Will Be (T)here

“So Who’s Giving Guarantees?: An Interview with Audre Lorde, Anita Cornwell,
“Showing Our True Colors”, Audre Lorde, 1990
“What is At Stake in Lesbian and Gay Publishing Today” , Audre Lorde, 1990
“Of Generators and Survival—Hugo Letter”, Audre Lorde, 1990
Selected Poems (in Callaloo), Audre Lorde, 1991
“Above the Wind: An Interview with Audre Lorde”, Charles H. Rowell, 1991
Healing Narratives: Women Writers Curing Cultural Dis-ease , Gay Wilentz, 2000
“Cruel Enough to Stop the Blood” Global Feminisms and the U.S. Body Politic, Or: “They Done Taken My Blues and Gone”, Karla Holloway, 2006

mama audre
how did you no
facing gale
force consent

to plant letters
like collard seeds
who new how
to ride wind
dispersing into
breath
?

who did you
make
a line with no birth
certificate
tracing from
Grenada
to St. Croix
to New Orleans
a bee-line
designed to clog machine guns
an oracle
fashioned from scraps
of cloth and ink
?

'i wish
you were
living

(up the road)"
and
i
no
that
you
are