Session 1:  A Knowing So Deep: An Underwater Writing Ceremony for Black Women and Femmes  August 15 6-8pm EST

“You had this canny ability to shape an untenable reality, mold it, sing it, reduce it to is manageable, transforming essence, which is a knowing so deep it’s like a secret.” – Toni Morrison, “A Knowing So Deep” Essence Magazine 15th Anniversary Issue 1985

When my mentor, now ancestor Cheryll Y. Greene compiled the special anniversary issue of Essence Magazine with the collaboration historian Paula Giddings, they asked Toni Morrison to offer the last word.  Morrison sent a letter to Black women that reads as a collective praise poem, a reckoning and an intergenerational clarification that includes herself, her sisters, her ancestors and those to come.  The depth of the poem and its oceanic rhythm was informed by the writing she was doing at the time, which would become the novel Beloved.  In this moment when we are reaching to honor the depth of Morrison’s impact and the imperative messages her legacy offers for our living, loving and creative action, I offer a writing ceremony specifically for Black women (trans and cis) and genderqueer Black femmes who see themselves in Morrison’s lineage and legacy.

Sign up here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/a-knowing-so-deep-a-writing-ceremony-in-honor-of-toni-morrison-for-black-women-and-femmes-tickets-68863684133

*This is a writing ceremony in honor of Toni Morrison facilitated by Sista Docta Alexis Pauline Gumbs.  Based on Alexis’s archival research and deep study of Morrison’s work, this sessions is an opportunity for people who want to honor the specificity and eternal impact of Toni Morrison’s body of writing.  The approach will be interactive and writing focused.  Participants can choose to participate via video, audio, chat or all three. The sessions will not be recorded to honor the confidentiality of the participants.

This session is specifically for Black women and femmes. There will be later sessions that are open to other folks who want to honor Morrison’s legacy. If you sign up and cannot attend your contribution will be considered a donation to the ongoing work of Brilliance Remastered and Eternal Summer of the Black Feminist Mind; there are no refunds.

To be notified about upcoming sessions join the Brilliance Remastered Email list at http://www.alexispauline.com/brillianceremastered/contact/

In memory of Toni Morrison, and in celebration of the poems by Toni Morrison I just read this morning,  I am reposting an essay I wrote for the Toni Morrison Society conference in 2008 when I was in graduate school.  I couldn’t get to the conference so my cherished sibling Zachari Curtis read it aloud on my behalf. (The quote that ends this essay will be where we begin in our upcoming series of online ceremonies inspired by Toni Morrison. Join the list here, if you want to be sure to get the sign up info. Update: The link for the first session (for Black Women and Black Femmes only) is here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/a-knowing-so-deep-a-writing-ceremony-in-honor-of-toni-morrison-for-black-women-and-femmes-tickets-68863684133

I.

May we open with an artifact?

On October 27^th 1975 Toni Morrison wrote a letter to June Jordan, the poet, on behalf of Random House, the publishing company, in regards to the possibility of publishing her poems:

“The answer they gave was ‘we would prefer her prose—will do poetry if we must.’ Now I would tell them to shove it if that were me—and place my poetry where it was received with glee. But I am not you. Nor am I a poet.”

Toni Morrison is not a poet. One thing that Toni Morrison learned in her many years working for New York City’s Random House publishing company was that the economy of publishing in the United States was in no way random. Especially not when it came to race. Despite her intimate knowledge of the constraints of the mainstream publishing, as an editor Toni Morrison made miracles. She words that were never meant to survive a way through to the future. Many of these have been the words I needed to survive up to this moment. The Library of America edition of James Baldwin’s Collected Essays, Toni Cade Bambara’s post-humously published novel (These Bones Are Not My Child) and short stories (Deep Sightings and Rescue Mission). It was Morrison, before she even published her own first novel, who pushed other now iconic black women writers into print. Often the difference between whether a particular book is or is not is print is literally whether or not Toni Morrison got involved. Without the diligence, strategy and vision of Toni Morrison there is no reason to think the category “Black Women Writers” would be teachable or even imaginable in the literary field.

Sometimes the depth and tactility of the worlds Toni Morrison creates in her novels lead me to believe that she is god. Such a conclusion would be unfair, to Morrison and to the rest of us, but it is fair to assert that Toni Morrison is and has been a major force in the world of black women’s publishing, and black publishing generally in the United States. This paper uses Morrison’s role as a key figure to focus an examination of two broad problems in the project black publishing oriented toward freedom: the problem of poetry and the problem of profit.

II.

(Black) Poetry is a problem in the American publishing market. (Publishing is a problem in the black market of poetry.) So I find Martinican theorist Edouard Glissant’s concept of forced poetics a useful analytic through which to examine the problem of poetry in the American market. For Glissant, the dilemma of the situation of forced poetics is a result of oppression. Everything the oppressed person says, in the language of their oppression, reproduces the situation of oppression because it comes from that same situation. Poetic right? In other words nothing we say is actually free from oppression, because we who are speaking are still oppressed. Even our mouths, our hands and the words we choose to toss towards one another.

I would argue that on the level of publishing, within a market, this is even more pervasive. How, in a capitalist market could you possibly publish something that does not consent to a capitalist system (even while appearing not to)? How in a dominant society that presumes and benefits from the unfreedom of black people could you publish poems by or for free black people?

June Jordan, the same difficult to publish poet we began with, had some ideas about this problem. In her essay “The Difficult Miracle of Black Poetry in America or Something Like a Sonnett for Phillis Wheatley” June Jordan illustrates the paradox thusly

“A poet is somebody free. A poet is someone at home.

How should there be Black poets in America?”

Elaborating on the impossibility of black poetry in a country that enforces illiteracy and homelessness for black people, June Jordan describes the existence of black woman poet Phillis Wheatley as a miracle. And if publishing a book of poems as a slave was difficult, Jordan mentions Wheatley’s lost second book of poems to assert that it would have been even harder to publish the poems of an independent black woman than to publish the poems of a slave.

Jordan says “I believe no one would have published the poetry of Black Phillis Wheatley, that grown woman who stayed with her chosen Black man….From there we would hear from an independent Black woman poet in America.

Can you imagine that in, 1775?

Can you imagine that today?”

What is June Jordan suggesting? Hold this in your imagination for a moment because I think it might be true.

The poems of the enslaved are easier to sell than the poems of the free.

And that’s if you can sell poetry at all. In Toni Morrison’s letter to June Jordan, the poet, she explained that the rejection of June Jordan, the poet, as a poet by the very strategic Random House was based on (quote) “a rudimentary capitalistic principle” prose is a commodity that can be sold, poetry, is something else. I agree with Random House on the distinction that they make between narrative form and poetry. Stories, novels and essayys as mind-expanding, affirming transformative and beautiful as they may be when in the hands of someone like Toni Morrison are still, contained when compared with poetry. Sylvia Wynter (yet another Caribbean theorist) defines the “poetic” as the way we create a world by trying and failing to describe a human relationship to an environment. Poetry is an unwieldy product because it never quite stops being a process. Poetry, as Sylvia Wynter defines it, is dangerous to capital because it challenges the presumption that human beings are related to each other and to their environment through a means of production, and through access to commodities. Poetry, thus defined, says maybe I’m related to you through a process of creation. Maybe we can’t buy or sell each other, maybe the fundamental shape of our relationship is the way my words fit in your mouth. Or vice versa. Who is Phillis Wheatley? What is black poetry after slavery?

How do you sell poetry by poets if a poet is a person not for sale?

III.

And who would you sell that poetry to anyway? The problem of profit in the mainstream publishing market is a primary determining factor in which books stay in print and which words become inaccessible to the future. How then, could one possibly be accountable to an audience of the rare, marginalized, silenced, undertaught, criminalized people we love? To be blunt: Is it possible to publish anything on a widescale in the United States that is not ultimately for white people with access to education and disposable book-buying money? Who cares if I have something to say to you?

In 1977 only two years after Toni Morrison’s realist letter to the poet June Jordan, the two writers were part of a New York based group of black women writers called the “Sisterhood” along with Alice Walker, Ntozake Shange and many others. These women envisioned an autonomous black women’s publishing initiative that would have been called Kizzy Enterprises. Kizzy Enterprises, which Ntozake Shange offered to house, in her house was intended to be a not for profit black publishing enterprise, which would keep important black texts in print, publish a periodical targetted to the black working masses and be supported, not by sales, but by the contributions of like-minded people. According to the minutes taken in the Sisterhood planning meetings for Kizzy Enterprises Toni Morrison made it very clear that none of the plans for Kizzy should be mentioned to Random House. Evidently Morrison understood black non-market publishing to be incompatible with a mainstream publishing market in which she was still strategizing to support black women writers. In the end Kizzy Enterprises was never born. A friend of ours asked Ntozake Shange about it the other day and she barely remembers the idea. I would never have known about it if June Jordan hadn’t kept the meeting minutes and if Harvard hadn’t kept June Jordan’s files. Kizzy remains an idea haunting the black presence in the literary market which remains determined by mainstream publishing interests.¹

Some things are never meant to survive. And sometimes they do. Because look at what is happening now. I choose to read this history as evidence that autonomous publishing oriented towards freedom is something that is still making. Among other reasons, this is because despite what she has to say, Toni Morrison is a poet.

May we close with an artifact?

In May 1985 Toni Morrison wrote an essay for the 15^th anniversary issues of Essence Magazine. Cheryll Y. Greene, a genius and warrior who fought to publish towards freedom in the very confining pages of this black fashion and beauty magazine, created a Celebration of Black Womanhood, for this anniversary issue of Essence and asked Toni Morrison to provide some last words. Toni Morrison the poet addressed June Jordan retroactively and all of us with these last words and now we address her too:

“You had this canny ability to shape an untenable reality, mold it, sing it, reduce it to its manageable, transforming essence, which is a knowing so deep it’s like a secret. In your silence, enforced or chosen, lay not only eloquence but discourse so devastating that “civilization” could not risk engaging in it lest it lose the ground it stomped. All claims to prescience disintegrate when and where that discourse takes place. When you say “No” or “Yes” or “This and not that,” change itself changes.”

Thank you.

**********

*That closing note “A Knowing So Deep” will be the starting point for our webinar series in honor of Morrison. Join the list here, if you want to be sure to get the sign up info.  Sign up for the first session is now open here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/a-knowing-so-deep-a-writing-ceremony-in-honor-of-toni-morrison-for-black-women-and-femmes-tickets-68863684133

This is part of the Brilliance Remastered Breathing is Brilliant reprise of Eternal Summer of the Black Feminist Mind’s 2014 Black Feminist Breathing Chorus with new essays about institutional power and Black feminist brilliance.

“My people are free,” was a bold statement for Harriet Tubman to make in the midst of US chattel slavery, when the Fugitive Slave Act was in full effect and she herself was the most wanted fugitive slave in the land.

However it was exactly that visionary certainty that guided Harriet Tubman to lead hundreds of enslaved people across constructed borders and to lead the largest successful uprising of enslaved people at the Combahee River.

Harriet Tubman’s work to dismantle the institution of slavery in the United States resounds forever.  What people may not know as much about is the counter-institution building work Tubman engaged in throughout her life.  Tubman was a strategic genius and she knew that the freedom her people required alternative structures during and after the dominance of slavery as an economic form in the United States.

In addition to being one of the major architects and conductors of the famed Underground Railroad, which was its own robust, decentralized and adaptable institution committed to the consistent undermining of the system of slavery, Tubman practiced micro-institutional development as a major freedom practice.   For example, immediately after more than 700 enslaved people from the Gullah region near the Combahee River stole themselves free and helped burn down 32 plantation buildings and flood the rice fields that were funding the confederacy, they needed something to build in the place of what they had necessarily destroyed.  In the case of the newly free who identified as men, military service was a primary option, and many of those men joined the Union Army and led to the Union victory in the Civil War.  Harriet Tubman helped trained those people and also trained the women who had freed themselves and their families to start their own businesses (especially laundry and pie-making businesses, which she had experience in personally) to create new income streams for themselves and their families during and after the war.

Later, when Harriet Tubman moved to New York State long-term with her family she created a home for Black elders who didn’t have access to care in the existing systems to face old age with dignity and care.  I hope that one day Harriet Tubman is as celebrated for what she built and nurtured as what she escaped and helped destroy.   Among many lessons (for example Harriet Tubman’s standard for white collaboration was very high—she only collaborated with white people who were willing to literally risk their lives for the freedom of Black people—and Abraham Lincoln didn’t make the cut), Harriet Tubman’s life has much to teach those of us who are mobilized by the clarity of our critique to dismantle the interlocking systems of oppression (#combaheetaughtus).  What exactly do we need to be building as we dismantle that which harms our communities? How can we use the expertise we have gained under oppression to train ourselves and others to nurture their freedom?

What is at least one thing you have learned by surviving in oppressive circumstances that you could teach other people in your community?  

Towards this freedom-building approach we are offering a guided meditation inspired by Harriet Tubman’s acknowledgement that our people are already free, we just have to build a world that honors and acknowledges that on every scale.

Of course this is what we work through all the time at Brilliance Remastered, so if you are not yet part of the Brilliance Remastered Brain Trust sign up to be first to learn about our online and in person events here.

And if you want to get involved with the Mobile Homecoming Trust Living Library and Archive (the love based institution we are building out of generations of queer black brilliance right now) check us out at mobilehomecoming.org.

Loving you with every breath, because breathing is brilliant. 

Always,

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 2019.

“All things work together for good” is the moral at the end of one of Pauline Hopkins’ stories about the Black women’s club movement as a site of drama, learning and transformation.

Pauline Hopkins’ name has been spoken for a century and a half and should be sung forever (and not only because of the beauty and elegance of her actual name!)  Hopkins is best known for the novels that she published in her 40s, but she was active in the literary movement from a young age and staged her first play when she was 20 years old.   Pauline Hopkins is an example of what Sangodare and I call a “by every means approach.”

As a Black woman born in the 1850s in Portland, Maine when slavery was still legal in the United States and the Fugitive Slave Act was in effect, Hopkins had to create the spaces for expression that her creative work required.  She also took a leadership role in some of the very first Black publications in the United States.  She served as a shareholder and board member of the Colored Co-operative Publishing Company and editor of The Colored American Magazine which raised important debates about the trajectory of Black freedom.  Her voice had such an impact within Black intellectual spheres that Booker T. Washington found it dangerous.  He bought the publishing company in a hostile takeover and installed an editor who was more amenable to his own views.   Hopkins was immediately hired by another national monthly magazine based in Atlanta called Voice of the Negro.  Eventually Hopkins collaborated with the founding editor of The Colored American Magazine to found New Era Magazine in 1916.

      Although everything I have just mentioned happened at least a century ago, without digital technology, Pauline Hopkins created a mobile approach with local investments through her participation in the Club Women’s Movement, a network through which Black women created national and international networks of information and funding through local events that often took place in homes.  Hopkins also worked with her family of origin to create creative spaces of Black engagement and imagination through Hopkins Colored Troubadours which traveled and performed musical theater, including her play The Slave’s Escape or the Underground Railroad.  Three of Hopkins novels were published serially in the magazines that she was involved in which helped her build an audience for her work in the communities she was most engaged in cultivating.  Her best known novel Contending Forces could also be a poetic way to describe her career.  Despite the deadly constraints on the mobility of Black people during her lifetime, the outright attacks of powerful “race men” within the Black community on her work as a Black woman writer and the strictures of sexism, Pauline Hopkins drew on multiple institutions and multiple modes to maintain the integrity of her expression.  Her approach required “all things” music, fiction, non-fiction, publishing, the co-founding of the Boston Historical Society and more.

For those of us navigating repressive times, people within our own movements with big egos, the reality of being pushed out of institutions we helped create and good old racism and sexism in their 21st century manifestations, Pauline Hopkins’ example has much to teach us.  She was a person who in the words of her story “Oceana” was “born with a vision so keen as to pierce the veil swinging between the present and the future.”

How could an embrace of “all things” impact your approach to institutional affiliations and the life of your work?  Hopkins’ emphasis that “all things work together for good” revealed a faith in her community of support that could withstand drama within the interpersonal relationships that sustained the club movement, drastic institutional changes and hostile takeovers and even social norms that limited what Black women’s role could be in activist, intellectual and creative spaces.

Can you make a drawing, chart or list of multiple outlets and groups you have access to that could support your work in the communities you are most accountable to? How can your investment in those spaces nourish your own creative options?

As a blessing for the way things are coming together to support your vision we offer this meditation inspired by Pauline Hopkins.  Your purpose is bigger than any organization or conflict.  It lives on.

And of course, this is what we cultivate all the time at Brilliance Remastered 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 2019.

“I dare myself to dream,” was how the writer and activist Joseph Beam kept himself brave.  As the first person to ever publish a collection of writing by and about out Black gay men, Beam had to dare himself and others to be proudly who they were in print.  This daring dreaming allowed Beam to create something that had never existed, to document the lives and literature of a community of men too many of whom would die too young from AIDS and to create precedents for generations of Black gay geniuses.

So I am offering this post on what we call Precedents Day, which is also Audre Lorde’s birthday this year.  Audre Lorde felt that Joseph Beam was a gift to her life.  And the feeling was mutual.  In fact, Joseph Beam was inspired to create his groundbreaking anthology In the Life by the work of Black feminists and feminists of color.  As he wrote in a letter to Barbara Smith, it was the work of the editors of Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology and This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color that made him feel like such a work was possible and necessary and to understand the impact it could have on the Black community as a whole.  He reached out with gratitude and asked for advice from the women he thought of as his teachers in practice.  “Brother to Brother” the essay where Joseph Beam declares that “Black men loving Black men is the revolutionary act of the eighties,” starts with a meditation very closely modeled after Audre Lorde’s “Eye to Eye: Black Women, Hatred and Anger.”

The love between Audre Lorde and Joseph Beam was not all words, it was also practice.  Audre Lorde sent Joseph Beam money for his first magazine Black/Out when she got her tax returns.  She sent it in a little card with a Black Unicorn on it (a not so subtle nod to her poem “The Black Unicorn” which meditates on the complexity of difference.  Beam was a Black Unicorn himself in that he believed his dreams were possible even when some of the people he considered Black gay elders discouraged him from putting the community in print.

As mentioned in the Breathing is Brilliant post in honor of Essex Hemphill, Joseph Beam nurtured a vision and created a collaborative practice that allowed his dreams to live on after his death.  And his urgent victory was shaped by key decisions about institutional practice.  In 1979 Joseph Beam dropped out of a graduate program whose racism was harming his spirit and not even 10 years later in December1988 Beam died of AIDS just shy of what would have been is 34th birthday.   In the time between dropping out and rising up, Joseph Beam dedicated himself to nurturing and creating institutions to support the collective visibility, empowerment and expression of Black Gay and Lesbian community.  In addition to the work that went into the anthology In the Life, he helped revive the National Coalition of Black Lesbians and Gays and to organize their conferences.  He created Black/Out Magazine as an outlet for the coalition.  In his first introduction of Black/Out he specifically contextualizes “out” as in “out-of-the-closet” but also  “outfront,” “outspoken,” “outrageous,” “outstanding” and says “welcome home” to the “outlaws, outcasts and outsiders.”  Beam was committed to creating spaces of affirmation for those inhabitiing the multiple meanings of “out” where space outside of recognized norms and institutional support could become a sustainable trouble of alternative modes of life.  Where being outside was the deepest way to be in, as in In the Life.

Those of us who are navigating getting out  by leaving institutions that harm us and dedicating our life-energy to the coalitions we need have much to learn from the life and legacy of Joseph Beam. It is fittingly poetic that his major publication work centered on the words “out” and “in” “Black” and “Life.”  As you may have noticed by now these navigations of the ins and outs of Black life require exactly what Beam lived by, daring and dreaming.  Outside of the world as we know it, is the dream.  And in Beam’s dream, Black men loved Black men and that love had a healing impact on the entire Black community.  In Beam’s dream our words became places to live.  He had to dare himself to live those dreams and he provoked others to join him.

What do you need to get out of?  What structures support you and the excluded communities you are accountable to be more deeply in your lives?  What dream could you dare yourself to actualize this month?

Joseph Beam’s work continues to live on in the work of the Counternarrative Project founded by Charles Stephens which is organized around Beam’s mantra that Black men loving Black men is the revolutionary act and B.E.A.M, the Black Emotional and Mental Health Collective which poet, healer and advocate Yolo Akili named in his honor.

We offer this chant and meditation inspired by Joseph Beam towards your daring.  May your dreams enliven you.  May they even outlive you.

And of course, this is what we cultivate all the time at Brilliance Remastered 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 2019.

“We are the ones we’ve been waiting for,” came from June Jordan’s “Poem for South African Women.” She wrote that poem to honor a tradition of effective, inspiring direct action through which South African women took to the streets to demand justice.

This phrase, which has been used by politicians (most notably Barack Obama) and other authors (including Alice Walker) over and over again offers an activating theory of time and impact.   If “we are the ones we’ve been waiting for” then the time is now.  This phrase has been a rallying cry for movements and generations of oppressed people committed to changing history.

But today, I want to think about the pronouns in “we are the ones we’ve been waiting for,” the “we.”  The double we, including us in both the categories of the waiting and the waiting for, the wanting and the wanted, the captive and the liberator suggests that we are not who we thought we were, we are more than we thought we were. And more than that that our wanting, what we perceived as a lack, was actually rich with the insight of how the world must change.  I thought about this when I read Aishah Simmons’ forthcoming anthology Love With Accountability in which Black survivors of child sexual abuse offer leadership towards the transformative love our communities deserve. (June Jordan survived physical abuse as a child and slept with a knife under her pillow to defend herself by the way.) The various Black survivors in the anthology share not only the depth of the harm they experienced when their families were not accountable for the abuse they suffered, but they also share a wealth of insight about exactly how the world must change if we are to live in a society where silence and submission are replaced by accountability and action in all areas of life, including politics, education and environmental justice.

Because as June Jordan also said, “Love is lifeforce.” (You can read the whole speech in Revolutionary Mothering: Love on the Front Lines.)   And if “love is lifeforce” then, Jordan continues “we must make love powerful” because every system of oppression, every act of environmental degradation, every act of interpersonal violence depends on the suppression of love in order to continue.  If we fully acted in alignment with our love, we would not allow child sexual abuse to continue, we would not allow one more war, we would not poison our own water.  And yet we do.  But what if we are not who we thought we were.  What if “we are the ones we’ve been waiting for.”

What if the exact same people (we) who are afraid of almost every necessary action, what if the exact same people (we) who learned early on that our voices did not matter, what if the exact same people (we) who are riven with heartbreak and cancer and economic desperation and the horror of watching our people killed in front of us were also—not despite all of those things, but indeed because of all those things—expertly familiar with the consequences of the containment and belittling of love (oh and forget hallmark).  What if because of all that expertise in what happens when fear takes the place of love, we are abundantly qualified to design and demand a loving world?  We are.  And June is with us.

June Jordan, a survivor of child abuse and multiple sexual assaults as an adult, forever the smallest in her classes at school, the only Black girl at summer camp, the protector of a nervous laugh throughout her life, the bad typist who often could not pay the phone bill, the visionary educator who loved and sometimes also feared her students,  the Black feminist who considered plastic surgery, the revolutionary who got so angry with her friends sometimes and who came in swinging to defend sisters she wasn’t even sure liked her, the small woman who went to Nicaragua when Reagan was threatening to bomb the place with an empty stomach and fogged up glasses, the divorced mother who said “poems are housework,” the Barnard dropout who said “wrong is not my name” is with us. I say, the architect who couldn’t pay her rent on time while sketching “a skyrise for harlem,” the sought after journalist who was blacklisted for her support of Palestine, the professor dying of cancer whose medical leave was denied, the prophet who died too young and who is yet still with us. June Jordan is we.  Supremely qualified to design and demand a loving world today. We. (Or as our Haitian siblings in revolt would also say Wi! Yes.) We. Exactly who we have been waiting for.

What does what you have been wanting, what you have been waiting for, what you have been painfully denied show you about the world you can build? How does it connect you to a collective of revolutionaries?

In honor of June Jordan we reclaim love out of the bounds of its containment by patriarchy heternormativity, a culture of sexual violence and the state.  Because we are the ones who have been harmed by a deadening suppression of love, and love is lifeforce.  We ready.  Chant along with us in this guided meditation inspired by the divine June Jordan.

And of course, this is what we cultivate all the time at Brilliance Remastered 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 2019.

“Nobody’s free until everybody’s free,” was one of Fannie Lou Hamer’s calls to accountability and interconnectivity, and she lived those words.

As the youngest child in a family of 20 children, Fannie Lou Hamer brought an intergenerational perspective to the time she lived in and her legacy will continue to reach far forward.  Hamer herself, a sharecropper who was denied educational access and worked in cotton fields from a young age learned about the legacy of slavery from the songs her mother and grandmother sang in the fields of Mississippi and also from her own archival investigation of the records of slave holders in the port city of Charleston.

In the image that is the basis of my collage, Fannie Lou Hamer and Ella Baker are in the midst of what I believe is one of the most brilliant institutional interventions on record.  In order to protest the complete exclusion of Black citizens from the electorate in Mississippi (which defacto led to the disenfranchisement of the poor white citizens) Fannie Lou Hamer and Ella Baker worked to create the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party.  They reasoned that the world already knew what a racist democracy looked like, but they had never seen a egalitarian democratic process that represented those who were racially and economically excluded.  So they created delegations for the Freedom Democratic Party, the Democratic Party that should have existed but did not (it still doesn’t by the way, but that’s another essay).  Black and white poor people in Mississippi voted and chose their own delegates and that delegation traveled to the Democratic National Convention to disrupt an institution that refused to transform.  Instead of merely critiquing what existed, the Civil Rights organizers who created the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party built an alternative that brought their overdue and yet futuristic dream into the present.  That meant that when Fannie Lou Hamer testified at the DNC to the violence she suffered for merely attempting to register to vote in Mississippi and asked the question “Is this America?” her question had the power of a living breathing threatening alternative born of the community-building work that she and others had done in Mississippi.

Fannie Lou Hamer followed up this work to bring attention to the electoral disparities in the United States with an institution designed to confront economic injustice, alienation from the land and food insecurity in one of the most fertile regions of the planet.  I had the honor of holding the ledgers for the Freedom Farm that Fannie Lou Hamer founded in Mississippi with national support in my hands in the Amistad Research Center, where the Fannie Lou Hamer Papers reside.  Fannie Lou Hamer funded the Freedom Farm with the same form of support that sustains Eternal Summer of the Black Feminist Mind, small donations, some of which were recurring from within and beyond Mississippi.

I encourage anyone interested in deeply transforming existing institutions and building robust and loving alternatives to study the life of Fannie Lou Hamer (and Ella Baker…more on her soon!)  For me, Fannie Lou Hamer’s example proves the fact that love makes us brave.  Fannie Lou Hamer loved Black people more in one year of her life than the United States has in the cumulative centuries of its unjustified existence on this continent.

In the legacy of Fannie Lou Hamer, may we ask ourselves what we can do today to actualize the vision she held that everyone could be free, and that everyone deserved the dignity of food, housing, safety and voice?   I suspect that my work to create alternative institutions of learning and a non-traditional approach to academic writing has done more to prove that other forms of intellectual life are possible than my critiques of existing institutions could ever have done on their own.  Do you have the opportunity to create (even on a small scale) a model that defies the limitations of dominant institutions?  Can you nurture and feed an alternative and say this is one example of what it could look like? That’s what we’re doing with most of our time (and the money our sustainers send) over here. (Click on that link if you want to sustain us!)

How can you make the alternatives you crave visible and tangible this year?

Towards the inclusive, strategic revolutionary institutional alternatives that your long for, we offer this guided chant and meditation inspired by Fannie Lou Hamer.   May her example continue to nourish generations.

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 2019.

“I love myself enough to be who I am,” is an enduring reminder of the connection between our inner work and how we structure our lives.  As a prophetic poet and activist who spoke against the deadly homophobic and racist silences that impacted Black gay men and the multiple communities that cannot evolve without Black gay genius, Essex Hemphill created prayers that cultivated bravery.  He offered his own life as an example of how one can live in their truth.

And Hemphill’s self-love, was not a selfish love.  In fact, it was accountable and activated by legacy and interdependence.  Hemphill was involved in ACT UP, a creative direct action queer visibility campaign to raise awareness about HIV/AIDS, to collectively mourn and to save the lives of gay people in the 1980s and 90s.  At the same time, he spoke to the exclusion and racism he saw in organizing spaces dominated by white gay men.  Hemphill’s love and accountability to his chosen brother Joseph Beam, led him not only to continue his publishing vision (working to complete the anthology Brother to Brother after Beam died of AIDS) but also to work with Beam’s mother, Dorothy Beam, to secure the archive of her son’s legacy with love and specificity.  Exploring the Beam collection, which is part of the Black LGBTQ Collection that my archivist soulmate Steven Fullwood nurtured at the Schomburg Center, changed my life forever.  And in one of my favorite examples of Hemphill’s expansive love, he appears in Aishah Shahidah Simmons’s groundbreaking film NO! The Rape Documentary which may be one of the very last times he appeared on film.  He offers a poem that holds Black men accountable for harming Black women in the ways that racism harms them as Black men.  It was Simmons’s film that first inspired me to revere Essex Hemphill as a Black feminist prophet and ancestor.  His impact on an intergenerational community of Black feminists is well-documented and should be celebrated even more. For example, in the Beam collection at the Schomburg you can read a letter from Audre Lorde to Joseph Beam where she unabashedly gushes about how much she loves Essex Hemphill and how grateful she is that her son will grow up in a world that Essex and Beam have changed.  All of this is to say that the self-love that allowed Essex Hemphill to “be who I am,” was not individualistic.  Countless communities, families, institutions and movements continue to benefit from the “being who I am” practice that Essex Hemphill fought for with the self-love a racist homophobic society told him was impossible.

Essex Hemphill’s example and legacy teach us that there need not be a binary between our self-love and our accountability to the important collectives in our lives.  Being who we are in our neighborhoods, organizations, classrooms and elsewhere is an act of love for ourselves and the collectives we transform with our being.  What decisions would we make if we remembered Essex Hemphill and thought, is this decision loving towards myself? Does this decision allow me to be fully who I am in this space?

I know personally that I have often thought that not being fully who I was in some spaces was safer and more convenient for me than the work of either showing up fully or leaving.  I have also underestimated the capacity of my communities to benefit from how attentively, creatively and infinitely I love myself.  But in the name of Essex Hemphill I know that the love I cultivate within myself is a resource.  It is my direct investment in the best hope that we have of the world we deserve where there will continue to be enough love to grow and change us all.

At Brilliance Remastered we support the process through which love can fuel revolutionary practices and profound decisions that make our lives spaces where we be who we are and exemplify love.  We offer this meditation which we created in 2014 inspired by Essex Hemphill to support the decisions you are making right now, daily and weekly and in this still slightly new year.

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