Yesterday I spoke on the phone with my mentor Jacqui Alexander and while we mostly spoke about M Archive: After the End of the World she also gave me an assignment to share my thoughts and any favorite reviews about Black Panther which premiered nationwide last night.  And then last night I watched the film with an intergenerational loud diasporic crew of Black folks.  I am interested in this major scale of rebranded Blackness and how it has and will continue to influence intergenerational iconography and ideas about Africa, Blackness, technology, resources and the dark.

Last month, during the Daughter Dreams intensive we worked with Audre Lorde’s poem “Blackstudies” as an intergenerational, image-rich text about imagining blackness consciously and through our nightmares and dreams.  Our intensive was also intergenerational and included at least one of Audre Lorde’s former students, part of the group of students she worries about at the end of the poem (“what shall they carve for weapons/what shall they grow for food.”)  And of course the poem is concerned with all of us, the generations impacted by the existence of waves of Black cultural revolution and Black Studies (under all it’s subsequent names).  In Lorde’s poem she connects this intergenerational concern with her personal healing from the way her mother taught her internalized racism and punished her for being the darkest daughter in a light-skinned Afro-Caribbean family.  By accessing her dreams, her prayers and her lack of access to prayer, Lorde reminds us how deep the work of naming and un-naming goes.

During our intensive the participants went just as deep, bravely and sincerely plumbing the depths of the connections between our internalized oppression, our closest relationships and our most cherished and feared dreams.  Gratitude to the Lorde who gave us names for so many things.  Gratitude to the generations that have named and reclaimed darkness, Blackness and the night.   Here are some of our names for darkness.

Some of Our Names for Darkness

by the participants in the Daughter Dreams Intensive 

“and when my mother punished me

by sending me to be without my prayers

i had no names for darkness.”

Audre Lorde, “Blackstudies”

love.

peace.

where you are where I can always reach you.

home.

knowing what I know I know.

my words make darkness for me to live inside.

love.

dark matter.

velvet.

illusion-

the rest of the Light I haven’t learned yet.

the rest of the Light I haven’t learned to see yet.

shapeshifter.

black honey.

energy to revitalize.

repair.

Owl.

friend.

pathway to the barn.

basement.

grandmas root cellar

spaces of food and fear

trunks filled with aunties journals and secret relationships

I read them all

freedom under darkness

who feels brave to walk? to fly?

Coyote.

Owl.

night creatures.

my cat wants to go out under darkness.

the night I was followed home.

everyone is asleep but I am still woke.

I am running.

I am hiding.

I am hungry.

I am angry once I am safe.

my rage is born of darkness.

it goes dark.

dreams come.

I love my dreams.

I wear them all ways.

always.

P.S.  There are 4 more spots in this month’s intensive M/otherlands: Audre Lorde and Daughtering in Diaspora.  Click the link for information and to sign up.

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.

Today I am in Hawaii listening to new and old messages from whales.  And I thought you, wherever you are might want some permission for listening.  Here are some messages from the participants in the Daughter Dreams Intensive.   And FYI the upcoming M/otherlands Intensive (Audre Lorde and Daughtering in Diaspora) is over half full already so sign up if you want to participate.

The Message

“It is a time when the bearer of hard news

is destroyed for the message

when it is heard.”

Audre Lorde “Blackstudies”

Listen to your intuition and let the heart speak.

There is nothing you can do to save anyone but yourself…but you are precious enough to save.

Shapeshift. Become the earthworm. Journey into the deep dark crevices of Mother Earth and be healed. You can go there in your imagination/reality.

Learn to love yourself. Deeply. Unconditionally. In spite of, regardless of, despite what the world around you and those in it try to make you believe.

Shit doesn’t have to make sense.

Last week’s Daughter Dreams Intensive rearranged my spirit and opened my soul. Twelve of us worked through our lunar eclipse and full moon revelations with the guidance and example of Audre Lorde.

One of the dream poems by Audre Lorde that we wrote with closely and bravely is what I call her freeform villanelle “Blackstudies,” written in 1973 while she was teaching at John Jay College of Criminal Justice (as the first Black faculty member in the English Department) and helping to found one of the first Black studies curricula in the country at the larger City University of New York.  This recursive poem works through the impact of repressing parts of her identity in order to participate in homophobic cultural nationalist spaces, the nightmare whiteness of academic approaches to language and learning and her own internalized racism and childhood trauma, and how all of those things impact her role as a mentor and teacher her students.   Yup. That and more.  By the end of the poem the speaker mediates on her own impermanence generationally in the movement and in the lives of her students.  Prompted by that brave move we wrote about what we no longer need and what we are now called to embrace.  As usual, I recommend that you read this out loud.

Soon and Now

“soon/ we will not need you/only your memory teaching us questions.”

-Audre Lorde, “Blackstudies”

you do not need humility

only expansive love

you do not need shock

only gratitude

you do not need control

only grace

you do not need proof

only practice

you do not need permission

only to step into possibility

you do not need fear of failure

only acceptance of what is

i do not need to hide.

only radiance.

only sweet sublimity to drink and trickle down my chin.

i do not need advisors

only ancestors

i do not need publications

only my words

i do not need productivity

only intuition

i do not need reputation

only my authentic self

I do not need permission

only spirit

i do not need approval

only tarot.

i do not need words

only presence

we do not need bullshit

only Love.

we do not need surface

we only need Love.

we do not need shallow

we only need analysis, skepticism, critical thinking skills, intuition, generosity, observation, and as clean an intention for the truth as we can possibly swing, all of which is to say

we only need LOVE.

The Daughter Dreams Intensive is part of the M is for M/otherourselves webinar series leading into the March 9th release of M Archive: After the End of the World.  All of the webinars in the series will be grounded in the work of Audre Lorde with a focus on mothering and daughtering.

The next intensive M/otherlands: Daughtering in Diaspora will be Feb 26-28th 6pm-9pm eastern time. To be sure to know when sign up opens add your email address to our list.

Last night 12 dreamers gathered in the name of the Lorde, in the pull of the blue blood supermoon eclipse.  We were guided by Audre Lorde’s lifelong engagement with her own dreams and the dreams of her children.  With rigor, vulnerability and generosity we shared about the intersections between our dreaming and waking lives, our definitions of daughtering (daughter as a verb) and the resistance and tension that exists for us as we work at the nexus of what is expected of us and what we are called to create.  We opened ourselves up to the stretching work of facing what is and dreaming the possible at the same time.  This was the first night of our 3 day Daughter Dreams Intensive.

The Daughter Dreams Intensive is part of the M is for M/otherourselves webinar series leading into the March 9th release of M Archive: After the End of the World.  All of the webinars in the series will be grounded in the work of Audre Lorde with a focus on mothering and daughtering.

To be sure to know when sign up opens for the next intensive (the M/otherlands intensive) add your email address to our list.

Daughter Dreams:  Audre Lorde and the Darkness We Need Now

Tues January 30th to Thurs Feb 1

7pm-10pm Eastern Time

“mother I need your blackness now”

-Audre Lorde in “From the House of Yemanja”

Some say daughters are made of dreams. The unfulfilled dreams of mothers, the unspoken dreams of fathers. In capitalist patriarchy the word “daughter” carries with it obligation, unrewarded labor and generational anxieties that are gendered, racialized, and economic. But what if we can have an experience of daughtering that is NOT bound by patriarchal or binary gender? What if the nightdreams of those of us who are here daughtering escape the predictability of our days?

Audre Lorde documented her dreams and the dreams of her children.  She wrote of nightmares about her mother, police violence, and the academy in her poetry.  She assigned her poetry students to keep dream journals as a major source for the poem that would construct what she called “the skeleton architecture of our lives.”

This intensive is the place where daughter meets water.  Based on Alexis Pauline Gumbs’s essay “Daughter Dreams and the Teaching Life of Audre Lorde,” which activates Audre Lorde’s poetry, essays and journaled dreams to argue for a deep dark queer archive of mothering and daughtering, this online intensive will use writing, reflection, oracles and Black feminist theoretical and poetic praxis to connect each of us to our individual and collective archives of alternate possible lives and a transformed relationship to the complexity of daughter-work.

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 January 26th.

If you cannot attend the course and want access to a specialized bibliography of readings on this topic by Audre Lorde, APG and other Black feminist scholars (curated by APG) offer a donation of $25 or more with the note “daughter dreams bibliography” here:  

This 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.

All day yesterday I was in a panic.  Hurricane Irma was battering the islands in the eastern Caribbean, specifically Anguilla and St. Martin, islands on which every single person is literally my cousin.   And pictures were flooding my timeline.  Pictures of actual floods, buildings torn apart, trees uprooted, cars tossed around like playthings.  The cemetery where my grandparents and father are buried? I would have to dive to get there. The buildings on Rendezvous Bay where my family lives? Unrecognizable.  My family has not even been able to afford expensive hurricane insurance, has not even rebuilt from the last major hurricane in the area.   Why should all that slave trade rage stirred up of the coast of West Africa dispossess the descendants of the enslaved again and again.  Yesterday as I anxiously awaited news from relatives I felt betrayed by every hurricane ever, by wind and water.

But two weeks ago I was writing with a community of artists, poets, scholars and activists about what it means to surrender to wind and water.   And this poem that we created together was what I needed to revisit in order to remember that even in the most volatile circumstances wind and and water have got me.  They have got us.  Our society trains us to believe that the systems that we have created out of fear are eternal and they are not.  Capitalism has trained me to believe that man-made structures are what make my life possible.  This has never been true.  Join me in revisiting a poem we created with deep knowing and without knowing why and how it would be relevant right now.

When Wind and Water Love You

by the participants in the Briliance Remastered When Wind and Water Got You Intensive

“if wind and water got you that means wind and water got you. there is no little bit about their lashing love.”

-from Dub: Finding Ceremony by Alexis Pauline Gumbs 

when wind and water love you

you have everything you need

when wind and water love you

there is no distance between you and the past

when wind and water love you

you can hear the ancestors teaching

when wind and water love you

there is no place they will not be with you

when wind and water love you

you are surrounded by love wherever you go

when wind and water love you

all your grandmothers are dancing

when wind and water love you

your doubts dissolve like tears

when wind and water love you

you don’t have to know your name (and you can)

when wind and water love you

it’s still okay to be afraid

when wind and water love you

you can trust that you are supported by the ancestors, always

when wind and water love you

you can trust yourself

when wind and water love you

coyote and wolf will trust the bones of their ancestors to you

when wind and water love you

turtles will trust their babies to you

when wind and water love you

you know the trees have your back

when wind and water love you

trees bend and are yet still beautiful

when wind and water love you

you feel so clear about your worth that you never have to compete with others again

when wind and water love you

you see the isolated ones and reach out

when wind and water love you

there is abundance. there is no hunger.

when wind and water love you

you will overthrow all oppressive paradigms

when wind and water love you

you will have visions of the formations of crystals

when wind and water love you

you will be invited into the iridescent cave

when wind and water love you

we sparkle like amythest

when wind and water love you

all is in motion, in storm formation

when wind and water love you

there is peace

when wind and water love you

you sleep in sacred sound

when wind and water love you

your daily life takes on the quality of ritual

when wind and water love you

everything thought to be lost, is found

when wind and water love you

you are in the crossing and carrying the crossings of your ancestors

when wind and water love you

you are always listening, always heard

when wind and water love you

the Elders and the unborn are singing together

when wind and water love you

your hands are made ready to catch the new world on her way

when wind and water love you

you will remember your childlike sense of wonder at this miraculous world

when wind and water love you

you are inspired to fearlessly share all your revolutionary dreams

when wind and water love you

you carry the adventure inside and every place is also home

when wind and water love you

everything they touch, touches you

when wind and water love you

the poem is everywhere

when wind and water love you

it is possible

when wind and water love you

you will always be at home

when wind and water got you

you can see from mountaintops and feel as deeply as the sea

when wind and water got you

knowing, magic and mystery are your guides

when wind and water got you

you don’t gotta do nothin else

when wind and water got you

you good, fam

Last week during Brilliance Remastered‘s  When Wind and Water Got You Online Intensive, the seven of us who gathered and the nine of us who held the space had no idea what wind and water would do in the next few days.  As we closed the session and I packed to fly to Texas, I certainly didn’t know.   As we logged in from our various locations we noticed wind and rain communicating with us.  We noticed patterns from our past coming full circle.  We noticed the transformations we had dreamed of and worked for coming to fruition.  We noticed that we had new and deepened ways to describe where we had been and what had gotten us through.

Drawing on a poetic intergenerational map of Anguilla I made for the current issue of Ecotone, we created a sacred circle that allowed us to imagine a decolonial reclaiming of space, a space sacred enough that we could be in place without being entrapped in capitalist narratives, a circle wide enough to include named and unnamed ancestors, a circle deep enough to birth futures.

At the end of our time together we created a poem in honor of that which outlasts empires and lies.   We want to offer this closing poem to those whose lives are being most impacted by Hurricane Harvey (one of the names for what is happening).  We know that those most impacted are those people who we are accountable to, whose access to stability, shelter and safety is already undercut by the daily practices of the state.  We are dedicating this to ourselves and other survivors for whom each so-called natural disaster reveals the true costs of the ongoing social disaster that treats us as if we are expendable.   We are not expendable.  The indigenous, immigrant, queer, black, people of color, poor loved ones in Houston and other areas who are navigating this storm and the resulting floods are necessary.  We offer this as a mantra and a chant to honor the part of them and each of us that capitalism and doppler cannot see.  This is for the eternal in you. Outlasting everything.

Outlasting Everything

by the participants in Brilliance Remastered’s When Wind and Water Got You Intensive

“there was us. there was only us. meaning water and blood and bone and stone and sun and change and we remain. outlasting everything.”

-from “Map of Anguilla” by Alexis Pauline Gumbs (in Ecotone 23)

spirit.

outlasting everything.

ancestral brilliance.

outlasting everything.

intergenerational love.

outlasting everything.

revolutionary commitment.

outlasting everything.

determination.

outlasting everything.

iridescence.

outlasting everything.

healing.

outlasting everything.

resilience.

outlasting everything.

expansion.

outlasting everything.

blueprints of wind and water.

outlasting everything.

positivity.

outlasting everything.

breath.

outlasting everything.

heart.

outlasting everything.

community.

outlasting everything.

spirit.

outlasting everything.

To stay updated on Brilliance Remastered’s online and in person intensives join our email list. 

Last month’s Becoming Turquoise intensive on intergenerational accountability was a necessary ceremony for those of us who gathered.  We danced with our generations, we listened beyond our fears, we gathered the traced of the connections we have, we traced the longing for the connections we don’t have and might not ever get.  We gathered together while in the midst of makeshift pilgrimages, at the end of major writing projects, after recommitting to our practices and with so much love.  And while we knew that many of the contemporary challenges we face at this time contain sinister echoes of oppressions our ancestors face, oppressions we don’t want to bequeath to younger generations, we could not have specifically guessed that Nazis and KKK members would openly harm people (so much like the 1979 Klan attack against peaceful economic and racial justice organizers in Greensboro) and that it would be explicitly condoned from the highest government offices.  And we sure as heck weren’t thinking that the president would be actively trying to instigate nuclear war on twitter.

At this time, we want to offer the wisdom we rooted down into then as a reminder, a healing salve and a resource in which to ground your necessary actions at this time.   I honor and affirm the knowing wisdom of the young black activists in Durham, NC who took removing a confederate statue into their own hands, and encourage you to contribute to the bail fund for those who have been arrested in relationship to taking down the statue and also in relation to showing up at court in solidarity with those activists.  You can donate here.

Also, sign up closes tomorrow for this summer’s last intensive When Wind and Water Got You: Place, Purpose, Past and Presence.  There are a couple of spots left.

Love always

Sista Docta Lex

i know

by the participants in the Becoming Turquoise: Intergenerational Accountability intensive

ancestors are holding us always

i know

dancing is sacred

i know

my ancestors love to dance

i know

the sacred sounds reverberate

i know

the funk is lasting

i know

the cosmic dancefloor is LIT

i know

sunshine is healing

i know

clouds have lessons for me

i know

monsoon rain is my favorite rain

i know

the thunder is not the danger

i know

the oceans are calling

i know

the whales are finding us

i know

i am both saltwater and freshwater

i know

we can swim anywhere

i know

animals, plants, birds are our medicine

i know

all the stones are singing

i know

broken jaws heal

i know

purple light is healing

i know

what one of us heals for ourselves heals for all of us

i know

maplessness leads to treasure

i know

even haplessness leads to treasure

i know

private property has never made sense

i know

giving love to the babies is an answer

i know

it is safe to love unconditionally

i know

dirt water fire rock come down the mountain as they always have and always will

i know

Gwendolyn Brooks was right

i know

the third eye beams like a searchlight

i know

love is life-force (i better act like)

i know

i am an alchemist

i know

every move is guided

i know

turquoise is a gift

i know

turquoise stones, turquoise waters, turquoise sounds

i know

all of me is a gift

i know

giggling is magic and contagious

i know

time to be unabashed in our love and in our joy

i know