This post is part of the Breathing is Brilliant reprise of the Black Feminist Breathing Chorus for Black History Month 2019.

“Sojourner Truth” named herself in honor of her journey and her purpose and her freedom.  It was one of her first acts of authorship, and though this was not the language of the time, it was one of her first steps in what is now called “building a brand.”

I kind of hate the language of “building a brand” because it makes me think of literal branding with hot metal on the flesh of human beings whose flesh was claimed like livestock.  (The branding of livestock also bothers me by the way.)  In the supposed freedom of the contemporary entrepreneurial push there are subtle and not-so-subtle linkages to slavery.  A persistent definition of personhood that commodifies everything, our time, our dreams, our emotional breakthroughs, our relationships to our children, our bodies, the images of our bodies (and images of our relationships, children, ourselves crying, our journeys) which are all infinitely “share”able (brandable?) now.  Almost all of us have consented to terms of agreement that make the actual images we share, property of huge companies that can do with them what they will.  And we have “consented” to these terms because it is how we can participate in the new marketplace of branded digital social and economic life.

Sojourner Truth was mindful of the use of her image early on.  I think often of the fact that she spent much of her life traveling to speak to audiences about her fervent beliefs in freedom, faith and the seeds of what we now call Black feminism.  And it was through these speaking gigs, the sale of her book (which she dictated because she never learned to read and write) and the sale of her image that she earned the money to buy the home where her family could have stability and reunion after emancipation.   The collage I made in honor of Sojourner Truth is called “Sankofa Substance” and it takes as its base that exact postcard that Sojourner sold at her speaking engagements.  Her critical thinking led her to communicate in words that her image had more value than the (at that time not-at all-cheap) photo printing process she engaged to create the cards, but was actually a way for those people in her audiences who wanted her to be able to continue to live and do the work she was doing in the world to support her livelihood beyond what the organizations that brought her could offer.  So the cards said “I sell the shadow to support the substance,” a rather bold proclamation for someone whose body had actually been bought and sold and abused during her enslavement.  I like to also think that “substance” speaks not only to her physical form, but also to the depth and substance of her oratory.

And now we live in the shadow world.  We share “shadows” (how Sojourner thought of photographic technology of the time) online all day long.  Those of us who make our living or market our community campaigns through online media, shadow box with the god of public opinion to support our livelihoods.   As someone who is at the beginning of a campaign to create a Mobile Homecoming growth and transformation center in Durham, which will require the support of everyone I know digitally and more, I am thinking about Sojourner Truth all the time.  We are trying to create a home where our chosen family (Black LGBTQ elders) can gather in their/our freedom.  When people support my partner and I, they are ultimately supporting the realization of that vision.

So what can we learn from Sojourner Truth now that amplifies our freedom and our faith despite the persistence of enslaving definitions of the “human”? First, we can call a shadow a shadow.  Understanding the difference between an image and lived experience, as Sojourner indicates, is key to actually building the relationships we all need to sustain our visions long-term.  Second, we can understand the multiplicity of “supporting the substance” which is not only building an economic livelihood but sustaining the meaningful existence of the communities that make our visions possible, which in my view always must happen on an intergenerational scale of continued inspiration.  And third, we can learn, like Sojourner to know that everyone we reach has a continuing relationship to our work. Our communities are not simply consumers of our oratory performances and images, they are key parts of the world we are making possible through our work to make the seemingly impossible visible and tangible.

What steps can you take today to move from branding to being? What are the tangible relationships that you want to invest in for the long-term?

Our offering to you is this Black Feminist Breathing Meditation inspired by Sojourner Truth. Take it as an opportunity to say her name, or to breathe life back into your own name and what it means for you and those who help name you.

And if you want to stay connected to Brilliance Remastered and be among the first to hear about our events and online offerings as they emerge, join the email list here.

And here are links if you want to support the Black Feminist Bookmobile Project and the ongoing work of the Mobile Homecoming Trust Living Library and Archive.

Loving you with every breath (because breathing is brilliant,)

       Sista Docta Alexis Pauline Gumbs

This post is part of the Breathing is Brilliant reprise of the Black Feminist Breathing Chorus for Black History Month.

“Drenched in light,” is the title of a story that Zora Neale Hurston wrote about an imaginative young Black girls who danced in her magic, turned a tablecloth into a shawl and refused to dim her shine.  We could think of little Isis as a peek into Hurston’s own childhood or a precedent for “black girl magic.”

However, like Zora Neale Hurston, even as a little girl, Isis has a complex relationship to race, genius and sources of support.  In the story, Isis escapes her grandmother’s home, where her family wants her to stop playing and get to these chores, at the whim of some white people who happen to be driving down the road and enjoy her precocious antics, but of course cannot and will not sustain her life long-term the way her grandmother does.  Hurston herself dealt with the consequences of refusing Black respectability norms and the privileges and extractions that came with of white patronage. Hurston’s short story, and the story of her life have much to teach those of us who strain against perceived limitations that permeate our communities of accountability and/or navigate the constrictions and downright indignities of using funding or institutional from sources controlled by those with greater privilege than us to amplify our magic and do our urgent passionate brilliant work.  Sounding familiar yet?

Collectively, those of us drenched in the light of Zora Neale Hurston’s legacy can support each other to evolve with our communities and to generate sustainable resources for respectful creative action.  But I also want to think about the desire to be drenched in light more metaphorically.  As we know Zora Neale Hurston’s name was tarnished in multiple scandals, her relationship with her main patron was compromised and after doing incredible artistic and anthropological work in the United States and the Caribbean and writing one of the greatest novels of the 20th century, Zora Neale Hurston died in poverty and obscurity.  Her grave was unmarked until Alice Walker, who chose Hurston as an ancestral inspiration, went to Florida to ensure her resting place would be known and remembered.  (In fact, this weekend Alice Walker, Hurston biographer Valerie Boyd and Hurston’s niece Lois Hurston Gaston are in Eatonton Florida celebrating the 30th anniversary of the Zora Neale Hurston Festival of the Arts! How beautiful to know that in the end Hurston’s legacy is indeed illuminated and accessible to those most accountable to her work and vision!)

The fact that for years Hurston’s name was forgotten and that she died in poverty however is still painfully ironic.  Especially since Zora Neale Hurston wrote a famous letter to W.E.B. Du Bois (who she felt used the scandal around a false accusation of her to punish her for her defiance of the norms and agenda he espoused for Black creative practice) where she proposed the collective funding of a “cemetery for the illustrious Negro dead,” so that none of our Black geniuses would have the fate that she ultimately suffered.

In a society where institution-building is the way those with means live forever (think about the names carved in the buildings in your town and on university campuses, the surnames of the foundations and awards we may all be applying for etc.), how many of us see alliance with a powerful existing institution or even creation of an exciting new initiative as a way to keep our names in the light, not simply for reasons of ego, but for economic reasons.  As Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarsinha has written in her crucial book Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice, part of the way ableism impacts activists and artists is that we fear that if we can’t constantly produce and show up doing awesome things we will be forgotten.  And that forgetting means no grants, no job offers, no invitations to speak on campuses, no excited fans and interns, no community support.  And our supposedly community-accountable work can get off track when we believe (and for good reasons in the age of social media) that our livelihoods depend on building a personal brand.  Brilliance Remastered believes that Zora Neale Hurston’s phrase can educate us about the abundance of light, the collective warmth that we can offer to each other as communities in transformation.  And we believe that work takes strategies for collaboration, and inner work to unlearn internalized capitalism, tokenization and fear of irrelevance and action to build lives of sustainable inspiration.

What is one form of support that has warmed your heart when you least expected it (it can be a form of support you gave or received or both)?

Towards the warmth and light our communities need to grow, we offer this guided meditation chant inspired by Zora Neale Hurston.  May you know that the light of the ancestors, the living and those to come beams all through you.  You are loved.

And if you want to stay connected to Brilliance Remastered and be among the first to hear about our events and online offerings as they emerge, join the email list here.

And here are links if you want to support the Black Feminist Bookmobile Project and the ongoing work of the Mobile Homecoming Trust Living Library and Archive.

Loving you with every breath (because breathing is brilliant,)

       Sista Docta Alexis Pauline Gumbs

This post is part of the Breathing is Brilliant reprise of the Black Feminist Breathing Chorus for Black History Month (also known as Audre Lorde’s Birthday Month) 2019.

“The power of love in the world is the greatest power existing,” was a phrase that shaped the trajectory of life-long activist Bayard Rustin. Rustin, the key architect of the monumental March on Washington, participant in non-violent protests throughout the nation, and activist on the front lines of movements for peace and justice until his last breath offered a spiritual understanding of power, that gave him and many others the bravery to challenge state and economic power collectively.

Rustin also developed the phrase “angelic troublemakers” to invite what he hoped would be generations of activists who would stop the gears of militarism, racism and capitalism not out of anger, but motivated by a higher love.   However, there were times when Bayard Rustin was not considered angelic enough and indeed too much trouble to be fully embraced even by movements and structures that he himself developed, including the Civil Rights movement.  There were even more times when as a gay Black man the political structures that he sought to make inclusive would not include him.  For example, in order to have a recognized legal connection to his life partner, he had to adopt him as a son, because there was no structure through which the logistical needs of their life together and his legacy could be honored on the terms he imagined.

   I think often of the fact that Bayard Rustin grew up as an athlete and a singer.   He was part of teams and choirs literally and metaphorically his whole life.  What can his life story teach us about the difference between moving between different roles for the sake of the team, or harmonizing and modulating our voices in collaboration with a choir and the erasure and silencing of institutions more attached to respectability than to the transformative power of love?  What is happening right now with your voice and your energy, in the context of the institutions where you work, create or mobilize, as love transforms you?

What are the places in the institutions you participate in and create that the power of love is showing up?  Are there current concessions you have made to other forms of power that now need to shift based on what love is teaching you?

Our offering is this guided meditation chant, inspired by Bayard Rustin from the 2014 Black Feminist Breathing Chorus.  May it be with you wherever you are, that love may flow through and activate the angelic trouble that is necessary in our times.

 

And if you want to stay connected to Brilliance Remastered and be among the first to hear about our events and online offerings as they emerge, join the email list here.

And here are links if you want to support the Black Feminist Bookmobile Project and the ongoing work of the Mobile Homecoming Trust Living Library and Archive.

Loving you with every breath (because breathing is brilliant,)

       Sista Docta Alexis Pauline Gumbs

This post is part of the Breathing is Brilliant reprise of the Black Feminist Breathing Chorus for Black History Month (also known as Audre Lorde’s Birthday Month) 2019.

“I am who I am, doing what I came to do,” was a radical statement for Audre Lorde, a Black lesbian feminist poet, educator and activist who faced criticism for her sexuality as she co-founded the field of Black studies, who felt tokenized and exploited by white feminists when she spoke out about police brutality.   And in what may have been the most difficult navigation of identity for Lorde, she felt judged and rejected by other Black women when her choices differed from their choices or expectations of her.

In my favorite of Audre Lorde’s many publication bios, for a piece she wrote in the journal Amazon Quarterly Lorde says that she is not only a Black lesbian feminist, but also near-sighted, fat, high maintenance and more.  Audre Lorde told Pacifica radio that she felt that it was important to claim every aspect of her being, not only so that no one else could use it against her, but also because she felt accountable for showing other people in her communities how to love all parts of themselves.  She mused on how much it would have meant for her, as someone who knew Langston Hughes and was mentored by him in the Harlem Writer’s Guild, to know that he was gay.  It may not have been possible for him to state publicly (by the way, Happy Birthday Langston Hughes), but it was a major commitment for Lorde.

When I think about the complexity of Audre Lorde’s institutional positions (first Black faculty member in John Jay College of Criminal Justice’s English Department, tokenized and invalidated poetry editor for the feminist journal Chrysalis, awkward almost elder to the Black feminist gathered at the Combahee River Collective’s Black Feminist Retreats, Black Arts poet who chose to leave Broadside Press due to homophobia, first Black woman to read at the National Library and who then had to ask a white audience not to laugh during her poems about violence against Black people, esteemed faculty member at Hunter where a poetry center was named after her who was not permitted to sustainably revise her teaching schedule when she had cancer, New York State Poet Laureate who could not physically or economically continue to live in New York)  I think about what it takes for any of us to love all parts of ourselves while we navigate and transform existing institutions and/or seek to invent and sustain alternative ones.  This is what we support each other to work through all the time at Brilliance Remastered. And while the strategies are many, and everyone’s specific circumstances are impacted by interlocking forms of oppression, one thing that we all are charged with is learning to breathe in multiple constricting circumstances.  No one else can do the work of being who we are, exactly where and when we are, but the extent to which we find ways to powerfully BE allows us to support and be supported by multitudes across time and space.

What can you do today, this week, this month, that offers you breathing room?

Our offering towards your breathing is this guided chant meditation inspired by Audre Lorde from the Black Feminist Breathing Chorus 5 years ago.  Take a deep breath and enjoy.  And take the loving audacity of the Lorde with you wherever you are.

And if you want to stay connected to Brilliance Remastered and be among the first to hear about our events and online offerings as they emerge, join the email list here.

And here are links if you want to support the Black Feminist Bookmobile Project and the ongoing work of the Mobile Homecoming Trust Living Library and Archive.

Loving you with every breath (because breathing is brilliant,)

       Sista Docta Alexis Pauline Gumbs

Audre Lorde, Worlds Without End: Audre Lorde as Mother of a Black Queer Speculative Future

Tues-Thurs May 29-31, 2018

6pm-9pm Eastern

Audre Lorde has not been celebrated as a founding figure of speculative literature, but she is.  Her mentorship of Jewelle Gomez, author of The Gilda Stories a Black lesbian feminist vampire novel that travels through time into a a dystopic and transformative future is just one major act in a writing and activist life that was characterized by creating possibility and connection where there seemed to be no future and by imagining mothering as an impact on the future that went beyond patriarchal forms of parenting or reproducing.

This intensive will look at some of the queerest, spaciest, most futurist and fantastical works by Audre Lorde as a resource for the ongoing Black feminist work of queering the future and will explore the connections between Lorde’s work and the work of Gomez, Octavia Butler, Janelle Monae and most importantly those of us involved in the intensive.

This online intensive is for people who see daughtering as a queer non-binary futurist work that is accountable for excavating the (sometimes suppressed) queerness of our collective history. We will activate Lorde’s legacy to queer our own understanding of our families, our futures, our freedom and our far-flung fields of influence.  (Some of this work will be based on the essay “Speculative Poetics: Audre Lorde as Prologue for Black Queer Futurism” which was published in The Black Imagination in 2013.)

Tuition for this three day online intensive is sliding scale $125-275.   All possible payment plans are available. Just let me know.

This intensive is limited to 9 participants.

Reserve your spot with a $50 (non-refundable) deposit here: 

Send an email to brillianceremastered@gmail.com with your intentions (dreams) for the course by May 20th.

This intensive is part of the M is for M/othering Ourselves Webinar Series, celebrating the release of M Archive: After the End of the World by Alexis Pauline Gumbs on March 9th 2018.  This webinar series offers a deep dive into the key concepts of Audre Lorde’s work as a queer regenerative resource.

What does it mean to be embodied?  Are our bodies descriptions, reflections of a larger reality, a smaller reality?  A bridge in scale?  Are our bodies a mandate, a command, demanding something of earth, of this moment?  Most days my body feels like an ancestral airport, arriving and departing, tension and possibility.  Unpredictable delays and chance encounters.    Today on Toni Cade Bambara’s birthday, I want to share with you a poem written by the participants in last month’s M/otherlands Intensive.   We were responding to Audre Lorde’s poem “Call” where she says “my whole life has been an altar/worth its ending,” and calls the name of every goddess, ancestor and warrior elder she can name in the space of the poem.

This Sunday I am thinking about what it really means to breathe in accountability to named and unnamed ancestors.  Temporary and in time.  The epiphany of this flesh.  As usual this poem is a ceremony aloud (during our intensive the lines of this poem were brought to life by our collective recitation and improvised singing by Mankwe Ndosi and drumming by Iyatunde Folayan.  See if you can hear us when you speak it aloud.  Open for who else is there.

(Speaking of open…there are a couple of spots open for next weekend’s Legacy Intensive: Daughtering in the Face of Death…sign up ends today.)

Flesh my Epiphany (Answering the Call)

 

by the participants in the M/otherlands Intensive

 

“I have written your names on my cheekbones

dreamed your eyes   flesh my epiphany”

 

-Audre Lorde “Call”

 

wind my poetry

water my ecstasy

insight my hunger

sky my ocean

 

ocean my calling

clouds my companions

stars my wolfpack

stars my children

 

mississippi my blood

whales my pulse

Lorde my light

Cohen my medicine bag

 

wizard my existence

wounds my entrypoints

wounds my portals

scars my adornment

 

land my longing

monsoon my tears

freedom my longing

fear my wings

 

land my teacher

plants my teachers

moon my teacher

auroras my ancestors

 

ancestors my university

unbelonging my knowings

truth my roots

disruption my roots

 

tend my growth

 

 

clock my jailer

rage my bed

expectations my murder

worry my addiction

 

desire my energy

friends my security

resistance my privilege

footstep my accountability

 

release my rest

repetition my process

resistance my teacher

failure my muscle

 

danger my complicity

hollow my fear

silence my fear

language my lifeboat

 

writing my balm

conjuring my sanity

 

red wine my ceremony

finger my food

tongue my judgement

 

exile my enemy

eat my enemies

run my life

waste my money

 

release my trauma

evaporate my rage

remove my chains

learn my forgiveness

 

unburden my flesh

undress my nakedness

cherish my writing

seize my legacy

 

sex my body

move my stillness

still my movement

 

journey my treasure

water my salvation

smudge my doubt

palo santo my transportation

 

Ifa my remembering

dreams my prophecy

love my imperative

this moment my healing

 

love my name

breath my spirit

breath my home

home my heartbeat

 

spiral my timeline

spiral my channel

song my conversation

satisfaction my present

 

dancing my medicine

connection my altar

ritual my relationship(s)

relationship my compass

 

kiss my babies

plant my seeds

dig my dirt

daughter my shovel

 

loss my sister

sister my blood

sister my ceremony

 

mother my mystery

mother my compass

mother my self

 

melanin my magic

magic my inheritance

honey my oracle

savor my truth

Last month during the M/otherlands Intensive we gathered to examine how Audre Lorde’s navigation of solidarity across national lines as a Black woman accountable to Black women framed her personal and political decisions.  We worked through the layers of our displacements, the many shadowed parts of our selves that show up in our longing to belong, in our vigilance for what has been lost, in the difference between the daughtering we do and the daughtering we dream could have been possible.

Today countless children are in the streets in the stark realization that their parents and the state have not evolved a structure to protect them, have not given them access to the peace that they deserve, the skills they need to love each other into growing up.  Children of color and especially Black children who have been mobilized in the Movement for Black Lives are playing a crucial leadership role in the marches around the country.  And Black and Brown children are risking more than anyone today to change our world.

Audre Lorde spoke out in Washington DC and many other places too.  She returned to city where as a child she experienced the simple slap in the face discrimination of a segregated ice cream shop and spoke on the Washington Mall at the first March of Lesbians and Gays.  And when she spoke she invoked “our children” in the collective sense, who would need our bravest action.

At the end of the intensive we grappled with the end of Lorde’s poem “On My Way Out I Passed Over You and the Verrazano Bridge” where she offers her vision of what we will make our bridges out of, noting that love is crucial but must be met by action.   This poem is our intergenerational “lust for a working tomorrow” a future worthy of the brave souls all over the planet, screaming their names.  (It is best activated aloud.)

P.S. We still have some spots for next weekend’s Legacy Intensive: Audre Lorde and Daughtering in the Face of Death.  Sign up closes tomorrow.

 

Not Only (By Love)

 

by the participants in the M/otherlands Intensive

 

“encircled     driven

not only by love

but by lust for a working tomorrow…”

 

-Audre Lorde “On My Way Out I Passed Over You and the Verrazano Bridge”

 

not only by love

but by spirit

not only by love

but by alchemy

not only by love

but by science

not only by love

but by hand

not only by love

but by play

not only by love

but by fight

not only by love

but by ancestral memory

not only by love

but by composted dreams

not only by love

but by breathing

not only by love

but by trees

not only by love

but by diving into mystery, spirit

not only by love

but by sitting with discomfort

not only by love

but by family

not only by love

but by history

not only by love

but by learning in community

not only by love

but by difference

not only by love

but by hunger

not only by love

but by sacrifice

not only by love

but by blood

not only by love

but by feeling the deep cut

not only by love

but by difficult conversations

not only by love

but by rigor

not only by love

but by the hard work of uncovering truth

not only by love

but by nuance

not only by love

but by duty to the truth

not only by love

but by remembering

not only by love

but by telling ALLLLL the family business

not only by love

but by forgiving

not only by love

but by walking through the fire

not only by love

but by protecting the water

not only by love

but by relationship with the land

not only by love

but by singing our prayers

not only by love

but by legacy

not only by love

but by vision

not only by love

but by distance

not only by love

but by memories

not only by love

but by heart

not only by love

but by translation

not only by love

but by decolonizing

not only by love

but by imagination

not only by love

but by tearing down what needs to go

not only by love

but by the cultivation of relationship

not only by love

but by sistering

not only by love

but by daughtering

not only by love

but by care

not only by love

but by protecting

not only by love

but by fire

not only by love

but by time

not only by love

but by home cooking

not only by love

but by cuddles

not only by love

but by sweating on the dance floor

not only by love

but by expanding and contracting

not only by love

but by resource sharing

not only by love

but by sleep

not only by love

but by breath

not only by love

but by daily poems

not only by love

but by telling and retelling

not only by love

but by bridges

not only by love

but by crossing

not only by love

but by reclamation

not only by love

but by letting go

not only by love

but by letting tired structures dissolve

not only by love

but by unbelonging

not only by love

but by mistakes

not only by love

but by humility

not only by love

but by reparation

not only by love

but by enough

not only by love

but by self-reflection

not only by love

but by healing

not only by love

but by growing

not only by love

but by intersection

not only by love

but by home

not only by love

but by ceremony

not only by love

but by practice

Legacy:  Lorde and Daughtering in the Face of Death

Friday-Sunday March 30th-April 1st.

Friday  6pm-9pm Eastern

Saturday and Sunday Noon-3pm Eastern

 

“When I have been dead four and a half seasons, dry my words, seek the roots where they grow, down between the swelling of my bones…” —Audre Lorde in her personal diary for 1974, archived at Spelman College

“There is no guarantee that we or our movements will survive long enough to become safely historical…”- Barbara and Beverly Smith, Conditions Four, 1978

Audre Lorde mourned her parents in her writing.  She mourned the relationships she longed for with them, that were never realized.  She mourned them during their lives and after their deaths. And then she wrote about her own confrontations with death as a Black lesbian feminist cancer survivor, who survived until she did not. Almost 20 years before she died, she wrote the epigraph that appears above. Instructions for what to do four and a half seasons after her death.   During her last interview “Above the Wind” she spoke of legacy.  “This work began before I was born and it will continue…but my words will be there.”

This intensive is an opportunity to look at some of Audre Lorde’s published and archival writings and interviews for insight on legacy and daughtering in the face of death.  This is for those of us who are grieving the deaths of people who we have daughtered, parents, mentors and other loved ones.  This is for those of us who play unique roles in caring for the legacies of mentors and historical figures, archivists, literary executors, unlikely heirs.  This is for those of us who are navigating terminal illness in our families and in our own bodies.  This is for all of us, because daughtering is intimate work beyond binary gender and death shapes the urgency of our work to create another world.

Tuition for this three day online intensive is sliding scale $125-275.   All possible payment plans are available. Just let me know.

This intensive is limited to 9 participants. When signing up please remember that this is what some people celebrate as Easter weekend.  Yup. I know.  Death, rebirth and all of that.

Reserve your spot with a $50 (non-refundable) deposit here: 

Send an email to brillianceremastered@gmail.com with your intentions (dreams) for the course by March 25th (that’s Toni Cade Bambara’s birthday by the way!)

This intensive is part of the M is for M/othering Ourselves Webinar Series, celebrating the release of M Archive: After the End of the World by Alexis Pauline Gumbs on March 9th 2018.  This webinar series offers a deep dive into the key concepts of Audre Lorde’s work as a queer regenerative resource.

Today is Audre Lorde’s birthday!  A high holy holiday in the universe.  Look how many people are wearing geles and celebratory African garb this weekend.  I’m sure she appreciates it!    This is also the last poem that I am sharing from our Daughter Dreams Intensive, which could mean it’s my favorite.  We wrote it after working with Audre Lorde’s poem “From the House of Yemanja” where she writes about mothering and dreaming and existing beyond binaries.  It’s one of my favorite poems (you’ll catch me saying that about all her poems) and it’s a poem that theorists have often returned to in order to theorize Audre Lorde’s ideas about mothering, identity and diaspora.  It talks about not being the daughter her mother wanted, it talks about the different ways mothers feed and frighten and fail their daughters and it invokes the mother of the orisha, the ocean, all life.

Our poem came out of our work to embrace the complexity of who we are, a wholeness of contradictions and healing.  There is not resolution but there is the ongoing (forever) complexity of our co-evolution, our continued dreaming.  We celebrate the eternity of the Lorde and the multiplicity of you.

With love,

Alexis Pauline

P.S. It’s also my grandfather Jeremiah Gumbs’s birthday today.  He’s the person who inspired my love of poetry and therefore the one who led me to the Lorde!

P.S.  Sign up for M/otherlands: Audre Lorde and Daughtering in Diaspora here!

I Am (Forever)

 

by the participants in the Daughter Dreams Intensive

 

“I am the sun and moon and forever hungry

for her eyes.”

-Audre Lorde “From the House of Yemanja”

 

I am soft and moon and forever reflecting.

I am unapologetic and myself and forever seeking freedom.

I am yes and yes and forever in balance.

 

I am sad and grateful and forever sacred.

I am tears and heart and forever movement.

I am honey and tears and forever medicine.

 

I am dangerous and full of silk and forever loved.

I am other and more than and forever expansive.

I am compassion and truth and forever desire.

 

I am Taurus sun and Taurus moon and forever Gemini rising.

I am tarot and oracle and forever conjuring.

I am word and fire and forever troublemaking.

 

I am god and goddess little girl and a devil’s advocate and forever loved to eternity.

I am raven and loving beautiful things and forever shapeshifting.

I am me, ever transforming and them, ever transmitting and forever everything that magic can contain.

 

I am filled and fulfilled and I am forever with space/time/energy enough for more love.

I am the water and the vessel and forever sailing across boundary lines.

 

I am cosmic and flowing and forever feeling.

I am love and love and forever everywhere.

I am the universe and the universe is forever me.

 

I am dance and song and forever spirit.

I am music and rhythm and forever heartbeat.

I am the hum, and the open mouth, and forever a room full of singing.

 

This intensive is part of the M is for M/othering Ourselves Webinar Series, leading up to the release of M Archive: After the End of the World by Alexis Pauline Gumbs on March 9th 2018.  This webinar series offers a deep dive into the key concepts of Audre Lorde’s work as a queer regenerative resource.

It’s the Lunar New Year.  Actually it’s my Lunar rebirth.  I was born in the year of the dog.  I am being reborn now.  One of the guiding questions of the M/otherourselves Webinar Series for me is what does it mean to daughter ourselves? How is it different from and related to mothering ourselves?  What are the engendering and ungendering possibilities?

During the Daughter Dreams intensive we listened to our inner children and here is some of the wisdom they brought.We will continue to explore these themes in the upcoming M/otherlands Intensive: Audre Lorde and Daughtering in Diaspora at the end of this month.  (Click on the link to sign up, there are about 2 spots left.)

Enjoy the poem! I recommend repeating this wisdom aloud.

 

The Child Speaks

by the participants in the Daughter Dreams intensive

 

“But I just washed them, Mommy!”

 

-Audre Lorde “Blackstudies”

 

get your hands dirty. cover yourself in mud and leaves and dandelion petals. dig. become intimate with the ground. leap groundward.

 

What you felt then is still with you now, what you have, who you have, all you have is in you, apart of. Choose to love.

 

Play. Play. Play. Make a beautiful mess. Be light. Lighter than you’ve ever been. Release whatever is heavy. Love me

 

i am NOT too much. i’m just the right amount.

 

This intensive is part of the M is for M/othering Ourselves Webinar Series, leading up to the release of M Archive: After the End of the World by Alexis Pauline Gumbs on March 9th 2018.  This webinar series offers a deep dive into the key concepts of Audre Lorde’s work as a queer regenerative resource.