Edith Henry was the oldest sister. She played the organ for the AME church. She was daughter and wife to church founders. Her life was a sacred work. Edith Henry baked the best desserts, smiled while she hung the sheets on the line. Raised her younger sister like a daughter. Gave birth to three different sons who died in childhood. Edith Henry fed the hungry newspaper delivery boy, taught her daughters glamour and music and time. Edith Henry died in a mental institution. Her legacy, her healing, her freedom is mine.
Thursday and Friday March 12 +11th 2020 6pm-9pm Eastern Time
“play the songs with the blues women howling. play the gospel of voices that crack. play the stories and clean the whole house up. scream your truth and invite me on back. let the mirrors be oceans and swim them. let the silver be unlock and key. tell the children you love them and need them. set me free.”
-from “Edict” in Dub: Finding Ceremony
Set Me Free: An Ancestral Accountability Intensive is a two night writing ceremony for the elevation and liberation of our ancestors and ourselves. My design of this intensive is in honor of my great grandmother Edith Henry and draws on what I have learned by cultivating an ancestral relationship with her. Edith Henry’s life was creative, generative and divine and it was constricted and cut short by multiple institutions, including the institutions of patriarchal marriage, mental asylums, and violent homes for the disabled. Our relationship clarifies and makes urgent my current work for Black queer liberation, disability justice, and a Black feminist recognition of the universe.
This intensive is for people who are seeking to be more specific about how they are accountable to their ancestors in their liberation work and their creative practices. We will use reflective writing and listening to nurture our ancestral relationships and to find guidance in their genius and their grief. This is a supportive space to deepen your ancestral work and your accountability to the world you are creating.
The course will be limited to 12 participants.
Tuition is sliding scale $200-350. Sign up with a non-refundable* deposit of $75 here:
(Write “Set Me Free” in the paypal notes!)
*If the course is full when you sign up, your deposit will be refunded. If you don’t attend the course for any other reason, your deposit will be a cherished donation to the ongoing work of Eternal Summer of the Black Feminist Mind.
This is part of Brilliance Remastered‘s series of intensives on Ancestral Listening celebrating the publication of Dub: Finding Ceremony, an ancestral listening text by Alexis Pauline Gumbs (Duke University Press in February 2020.)
