I have strong views on sex.   As a co-founder of the not safe for work tumblr Come Correct (bettacomecorrect.tumblr.com) I unapologetically let you know that “black feminist sex is the best sex ever.”  Having sex as Black feminist and with Black feminists (joy!!!) is a transformative, healing and sacred part of my journey to love myself and life itself better, deeper and more.

So needless to say I was thrilled to learn about the emergence of Arielle Loren’s Corset Magazine, a new magazine celebrating sexuality and centering the experiences and empowerment of Black women.   This is especially exciting in historical context, since Black women have been depicted in sexually exploited ways by and for audiences that are NOT committed to the pleasure of Black women (to understate the violence) and have at the same time been depicted in prudish robot manners in the name of respectability.

My excitement at hearing about Corset was akin to my joy in finding the Black lesbian erotic magazine Black Lace created by Alycee J. Lane (an interviewee of the Mobile Homecoming Project) in the 1990s.  The archive of publications about sex that are created by and accountable to Black women is a powerful, understudied small tradition.  I hope that we have reached a moment when many affirmations of our whole embodied selves can circulate, because silence about sex and sexuality is a silence we cannot afford in oppressed communities.  Our wellness, our ability to honor and respect each other and our very lives are threatened by the silence and shame that often surrounds sex and sexuality for those of us who are oppressed and marginalized people.   And sexual healing is a real possibility when sex can be liberated from its role as a tool of oppressive domination and reclaimed as a technology for loving ourselves and each other with our action, attention and affirmation.

The orgasm issue of Corset, hot photos notwithstanding, is not necessarily next-to–the-bed, poetic, immersive reading, but more like an annotated index of ways to approach the orgasm, from belly dancing to psychology, from a lesson on female ejaculation to a Christian testimony entitled “The Female Orgasm: A Gift from God.”

I think the most creative aspect of Corset which circulates as an image-filled high quality digital download (aka pdf) are the photo essays, which include close ups of succulent plants (think cactus) and provocatively framed photos of fierce feminine gender presenting black women.

The choice to focus on the orgasm itself in this issue is brilliant and I applaud the authors for getting to the point.  Most of the articles in the magazine are shorter than this review, but I’m not mad at that at all.  Who wants to read at length about the meaning of the orgasm? Okay a lot of us might, but the mission of this magazine seems to be less about the texture and depth of the writing itself and more about encouraging us to enjoy a kiss-sized accessible introduction to the concept, from the perspective of a woman who could be a play cousin, and then to set us free to go out and play.

Personally, the article that sent me out ready to play (yes in fact, even before writing this review) was India Ame’ye’s “How Chakras Influence Orgasms.”  Ame’ye suggests that while usually orgasms function as a much needed release of energy it is also possible to “recycle” by intentionally channeling the positive energy of an orgasm (or two) back up towards the heart as healing energy.   Best healthcare plan ever.

I applaud Loren for her achievement with Corset and recommend sharing Corset with family and friends as a way to have much needed conversations about the reality of sex (in addition to the many ideas surrounding our sexuality.)  The range of the articles from “The 15 Minute Orgasm” to “A Mother’s Decision: Raising a Sexually Aware Child” can be an excellent way to create intergenerational conversation, or conversations about sex across experience, attraction and gender.

I would be interested to see a broader range of writers across ability and religion featured in the magazine, a broader range of women represented in the images in the magazine (though it was nice that all of the women looked kind of like me, big natural hair and bright brown skin), and possibly some more writerly writers (I’m thinking of writers like Fiona Zedde) who have an empowering edge to their very word choices and sentence constructions which could enhance the experience of reading the magazine.   A step up in the language and writing would make this a holistic experience of yes, but already in it’s second issue Corset is clearly a comprehensive experience of yes which succeeds with an accessible and inviting tone.

Corset is an achievement and a resource in the way it provides affirmation in the form of first person knowledge sharing and a set of resources that can empower our communities, to have access to the possibility of sex as an affirming, enjoyable and educational  part of our relationships with ourselves and our communities.

(This is part four of a four part series.  Read parts one, two and three.)

Series Intro:

“Contemporary Black feminism is the outgrowth of countless generations of personal sacrifice, militancy and work by our mothers and sisters.”

“We have found it difficult to organize around Black feminist issues, difficult even to announce in certain contexts that we are Black feminists.”

-both quotations from the Combahee River Collective Statement, 1977

Can Black Feminism be quantified?

No.

I do not dream in numbers.   I am one of those word-lovers who even disdains scrabble because I find the transmutation of words into unequal numerical values such as “triple word score” somewhat sacrilegious.    So when I read the title of Part III of Duchess Harris’s Black Feminist Politics from Kennedy to Obama that asks “Can Black Feminism Be Quantified?” my knee jerked.   No.  I said to the waiting pages.  Measure love.  Measure the universe.  Measure God.  Black Feminism cannot be quantified.

And then I realized that all of these things had already been done.   Numbers are hiding everywhere, declared or undeclared.  Every quilt has a certain number of stitches, took a certain number of hours and days to make.   Oppressed people travelling under night have been numbering the stars for generations.  My mother calls me a certain number of times during any given week.

What an evocative question.  Can Black Feminism be quantified? 

Maybe.

IV.

Black Feminism Be(yond): Black Feminism and Abundance

At the end of the day Harris’s book is a testament to the fact the Black feminism lives.  In the most unlikely of places.  In relationship to the US government.  Somewhere the act of voting.  Even in spaces that look like absence.  The lack of accountability of every contemporary administration.  The contradictory presence of Black women in those administration.   Black feminism is a question that will never not be worth asking.  It has sides and synthesis.  To deny it makes it even more necessary.

Kind of like us.

We are necessary even for the politicians who wish we didn’t exist.  How else but the figure of the dangerous Black woman (in the form of the welfare queen) could Reagan et. al. convince poor white people to dismantle their own safety nets? How else but the figure of the dangerous Black woman (in the form of the tenured public school teacher and the district smudging parent) could conservatives continue to convince a country in urgent need of brilliance that education should be a rare privilege?    Like the monument of Mammy that Melissa Harris-Lacewell mentions in Sister Citizen Black women are that monumental necessary underneath, that without which a whole society could not remember to hate itself and devalue the work of sustaining human life.

And what would happen to capitalism if the world remembered to love itself?

So Black feminism is as abundant as a capitalist society’s fear of magic and survival and sharing and waking up ready.   If we are the hope and dream of the slave (yes I quoted Maya Angelou) then we are the nightmare of the logic that continues to enslave, turning life into a number of hours to work, third grade test calculations into numbers of prison beds to build, aspirations into student debt with interest, 99% percent of us into treadmill running borrowers of our own time.

Can Black feminism be quantified when the continual occasion for Black feminism is the dazzling way our lives and ingenuity defy quantification? When we were never meant to survive?

Lorde knows, this is the dangerous thing.  The instant and triumph of Black feminism.  The poetry of Black feminism’s abundant presence in the world.  Stack it up and it will always exceed the measure.   Like we exceed a state that doesn’t want our children to live.  Like we exceed gender categories that can’t see us.  Like how even Daniel Moynihan couldn’t understand how our enduring matriarchy was not extinct.

Our Black feminism is what the Combahee River Collective calls countless.

It is a certain extension in a calf muscle that changes shoes and keeps walking.  It is a flashing look in the eye that interrupts anything.  It is new vowels  and spaces in the word “sista.”  It is ancient depth in the center of the word “home.”  It is recognition.  It is touch.  It is a drink of water.  It is the acrobatic orientation of our bodies to love each other in a world that names us unloveable.  It is the all of the food, all of the faith, all of the falling and getting up.  It is like the unnumbered stars that electricity tries to hide.  Black feminism is like that, so bright and surrounded in infinite Black.  It is you who I can or cannot see from where I am.  It is love.  It is here.  Here we are.

And Harris’s book is bravely saying that we count despite the structures  we could never count on, despite the dreams that discount us.   That our definition-defying being is material.   That our presence or absence matters.  That there is no state without us.  No statement without the question of Black feminism.   Which is the same as the question of who and what can be.

(This is the third installment of a four part series read part one and part two here.)

Series Intro:

“Contemporary Black feminism is the outgrowth of countless generations of personal sacrifice, militancy and work by our mothers and sisters.”

“We have found it difficult to organize around Black feminist issues, difficult even to announce in certain contexts that we are Black feminists.”

-both quotations from the Combahee River Collective Statement, 1977

Can Black Feminism be quantified?

No.

I do not dream in numbers.   I am one of those word-lovers who even disdains scrabble because I find the transmutation of words into unequal numerical values such as “triple word score” somewhat sacrilegious.    So when I read the title of Part III of Duchess Harris’s Black Feminist Politics from Kennedy to Obama that asks “Can Black Feminism Be Quantified?” my knee jerked.   No.  I said to the waiting pages.  Measure love.  Measure the universe.  Measure God.  Black Feminism cannot be quantified.

And then I realized that all of these things had already been done.   Numbers are hiding everywhere, declared or undeclared.  Every quilt has a certain number of stitches, took a certain number of hours and days to make.   Oppressed people travelling under night have been numbering the stars for generations.  My mother calls me a certain number of times during any given week.

What an evocative question.  Can Black Feminism be quantified? 

Maybe.

III.

(We) Be Black Feminism and Embodiment

What is the relationship between the existence and relevance of something called “Black feminism” and the existence or categorization of a group of people called “Black women?”  Do there need to be some people on the planet who identify as Black women in order for Black feminism to live?

Evelyn Simien’s study of Black feminist consciousness and identity poll people described as “Black citizens” and “Black men and women.”  The struggle of defining the terms of the study reveals the unavoidable political scientific problem of categorization.  Of course there have always been Black people inside the United States who are not “Black citizens” (and not only because Barack Obama had to pull out his papers last year).   Did Black immigrants who may have been in the process of naturalization or undocumented participate in the survey without taking the risk of identifying as non-citizens?  And of course there are indeed “Black citizens” who are neither Black men nor Black women.   At the end of the day, like all researchers creating quantifiable evidence, Evelyn Simien had to choose and define categories.  She had to choose to ask the questions she was asking and not every question that could ever be asked.   And her study is success and a resource for political theory and a Black feminist victory in particular, as is Harris’s book as a whole.  Simien’s bold and  crucial act of creating a quantative study of Black feminism, implementing the crucial Black feminist analytical cornerstone (that race and gender matter) leads me to a question I have often asked myself.

What is the relationship between the project of Black feminism and the category of the “the Black woman”?

In one sense it is completely clear cut.  Do Black women need to exist in order for Black feminism to exist?  Yes.   In fact, the project of Black feminism does and should take as its number one task the survival of Black women who are suffering violence, imprisonment, death and discursive disappearance at terrible rates.

The possibility of Black feminism and the materiality of Black women, and the laws, political structures, tendencies, and rituals that frame our lives are inextricably linked.   This is why the work that Harris does to look specifically at how contemporary presidential administrations treat Black women as individual political figures and as a category of their constituencies is so important.  This is also why it is important for Simien to measure whether citizens can see the political agency of Black women in nuanced ways beyond either race OR gender.  (Remember it was only last presidential primary series that white feminists showed their ignorance of this fact by once again asserting that all the women—worth considering–were white and all the Blacks are men.)

The presence of Black women in the world is the call that Black feminism does and must respond to with love and action.  Black feminism lives in me, not simply because I am Black woman, but more importantly because I take seriously the task of loving, celebrating, learning from, fighting for the transformative, miraculous complicated existence of Black women on this planet.

However, not all Black feminists identify as Black women and not all Black women identify as Black feminists.   Black feminism lives in many of my brother-comrades and in their actions (not to excuse those who are faking the funk).  Black feminism lives in the recognition and engagement of many radical women of color who do not identify as Black.  Anti-racist white feminists participate in the life of Black feminism (and racist white feminists disrespect it with lip service).   Black feminism has and must empower what the members of the Combahee River Collective called a suspicion of any form of “biological determinism” always remembering that gender is a constructed binary and that gender liberation includes the complicated work of all at once, challenging woman as a category, changing the meaning of woman as a category through liberated action and love, holding sacred a trans-inclusive non-exclusive understanding and practice of womanhood AND understanding that the category “woman” may not need to exist for ever.

And then there is the category Black.    In her poem “Moving Towards Home,” June Jordan says “I was born a black woman but now I am become a Palestinian.” You see what I mean?

How do we stay specific about the expansive vision of Black feminism…which as a Black feminist love evangelist I see as crucial to the lives of every being on the planet, and the planet’s role in the universe itself?

If I wanted to quantify Black feminism (and some days I do, because I feel that it is absent from so many spaces), how would I go about it?  Can Black feminism be quantified by counting self-identified Black feminists?  Can the potential of Black feminism be measured by the amount of bodies read to be Black women?  More sinisterly, can Black feminism be abstracted (like intersectionality already has been) in a way that it is no longer accountable to people who are oppressed along the lines of anti-Black racism and heteropatriarchy?  Can Black feminism be stolen like the labor of Black women usually is,  always has been, over and over again?  When will Black feminism be over?

The need for Black feminism is written on the bodies of Trayvon Martin and his mother and his girlfriend on the phone.  It is written on the bodies of the Black trans women who are murdered in the street in urban and rural areas in our country.  It is written on the bodies of all the missing and disappeared Black girls. It is written on the bodies of effeminate Black men who are beaten within our communities for daring to be feminine.  The need for Black feminism and it’s relationship to Black feminine embodiment are brutally clear in the present moment.

And if in the future there is a not a person intersectionally oppressed under the sign “Black woman” will we have won? As Harris and many other Black feminists have pointed out, there are many racist politicians who also envision a future without Black women, and we are not in alignment.    There are many homophobic and heterosexist community leaders (like the board of trustees at Morehouse College) who would like to forbid men from expressing Black femininity as well.

But guess what? Black feminism lives.   In my body.  And unlike my body, I believe that Black feminism will live forever.  When it no longer exists as a response to a need authored by oppression it will continue to live in the primary way it lives in my body today, as an expansive love beyond its name.  In a complicated no matter what everyday simplicity that says love is crucial and will not be cut apart from itself.  That Black feminism that is present in the intensity with which I listen to my living and dead grandmothers will exist under other names, in other forms in the world we deserve.

In the world that we deserve (earlier referred to as a Black feminist/abolitionist state) we will still need each other. We will want each other even more.  We will act according to our love.

Which means that Black feminism is a practice.  A daily practice for some of us.   (Certainly for scholars like Harris and Simien) Black feminism embodied is the practice of preparing a world worthy of who we are as Black women, and everyone who we might love or become.

(This is part 2 of a four part series. Read part one here)

Series Intro

“Contemporary Black feminism is the outgrowth of countless generations of personal sacrifice, militancy and work by our mothers and sisters.”

“We have found it difficult to organize around Black feminist issues, difficult even to announce in certain contexts that we are Black feminists.”

-both quotations from the Combahee River Collective Statement, 1977

Can Black Feminism be quantified?

No.

I do not dream in numbers.   I am one of those word-lovers who even disdains scrabble because I find the transmutation of words into unequal numerical values such as “triple word score” somewhat sacrilegious.    So when I read the title of Part III of Miriam Duchess Harris’s Black Feminist Politics from Kennedy to Obama that asks “Can Black Feminism Be Quantified?” my knee jerked.   No.  I said to the waiting pages.  Measure love.  Measure the universe.  Measure God.  Black Feminism cannot be quantified.

And then I realized that all of these things had already been done.   Numbers are hiding everywhere, declared or undeclared.  Every quilt has a certain number of stitches, took a certain number of hours and days to make.   Oppressed people travelling under night have been numbering the stars for generations.  My mother calls me a certain number of times during any given week.

What an evocative question.  Can Black Feminism be quantified? 

Maybe.

II. Black Feminism: A Statistic?

To address the question of whether or not Black feminism can be quantified Miriam Harris turns to the quantitative analyses of the scholar Evelyn Simien which she calls “groundbreaking work to develop an empirical model that would take into account the interlocking effects of race and gender,” (99).   Without rehashing the in-depth explanation of Simien’s survey methods and findings in Harris’s book ( YOU SHOULD READ THE BOOK!) basically what we have is statistical confirmation of the fact that Black women are asked to choose race over gender while Black men never are and this discursive problem,  and the fact that within racist heteropatriachy such a choice can even be imagined, is what leads Harris to conclude that “gender matters.”

Of course gender matters.  To what extent do statistics matter in the reiteration of this ongoing and necessary critique of an androcentric Black political imaginary?

I’m not going to lie.  Though I had a statistics teacher in high school who was truly passionate about statistics, I only endured it as an advanced placement class that would allow me to get out of taking calculus in college (now that I’m teaching myself calculus while developing a theory of black feminist calculus based in a black feminist poetics of limits I’m not so sure that was a great idea, but I digress.)

It seemed to me statistics was a plot and the point was to present a narrative about the world.  A statement, shall we say, designed to argue that life is predictable.

And I am still too philosophical to settle the question of the meaning of life.  Is life itself predictable?  I am not sure.  I do notice that oppression is rather predictable, since it is designed for the task of fragmenting life away from freedom, dividing you away from the time of your life, striving to keep us apart as collaborative trouble-makers.   Our life experiences are interrupted by predictable patterns of oppression (How many times a day do you think about food?  What is the ratio of trees to people?), but that does not make life itself predictable.   Does it make oppression understandable?

Simien’s inspired and useful study measures whether when asked to fragment their political vision along lines of race or gender, women (aka people who have already answered affirmatively to a very binary question about what possible meaning their life has in relationship to the political category of gender) will fall for the trick of choice (Simien calls it “hierarchy of interests”) , or will continue to be multiple.    Black feminist consciousness, in this particular study is measured by whether a respondent will affirm the Black feminist proposition that both sexism in the “Black movement” and racism in the “women’s movement” impact the lives of Black women.

I am a Black feminist and I say yes.  The Black feminism of the question is that it does not allow the respondent to segment the two simplified movements.  And the Black feminist claim of the study itself (which the responses support even when the respondents do not demonstrate feminist consciousness) is that Black feminist consciousness is not the same as “feminist consciousness,” (Harris adds the key word when she explains Black feminism is not equal to white feminism) and also that Black feminist consciousness is not the same as race identification.   Fragmentation can be measured and quantified.  Oppression is predictable: it divides us from each other, from ourselves, and sometimes, politically from our own best interests.   But what is ultimately quantified here?  Is it Black feminism itself or its distance and isolation from other forms of self-understanding?   Gender does matter, as an analytic and a form of identification.   But does the practice of Black feminist quantifcation on these terms lead us to remake  and remake ourselves into doublecrossed statistics bound to proving our positionality instead of shifting the terms of our existence?

Where is the Black Feminism itself?  Can the variables of the unlikely decision to choose our whole selves and each other be enumerated?  The substantive vision itself, the world we want to live in?  The in the moment ethics that our Black feminism implies and enacts?  Maybe those are questions destined to stay qualitative, since the quality of our lives and those of those to come depend on them.

Can Black feminism be quantified?   Maybe not…

(To be continued Thursday with “We Be: Black Feminism and Embodiment”)

“Contemporary Black feminism is the outgrowth of countless generations of personal sacrifice, militancy and work by our mothers and sisters.”

“We have found it difficult to organize around Black feminist issues, difficult even to announce in certain contexts that we are Black feminists.

-quotations from the Combahee River Collective Statement, 1977

Can Black Feminism be quantified?

No.

I do not dream in numbers.   I am one of those word-lovers who even disdains scrabble because I find the transmutation of words into unequal numerical values such as “triple word score” somewhat sacrilegious.  So when I read the title of Part III of Duchess Harris’s Black Feminist Politics from Kennedy to Obama that asks “Can Black Feminism Be Quantified?” my knee jerked.   No.  I said to the waiting pages.  Measure love.  Measure the universe.  Measure God.  Black Feminism cannot be quantified.

And then I realized that all of these things had already been done. Numbers are hiding everywhere, declared or undeclared.  Every quilt has a certain number of stitches, took a certain number of hours and days to make.  Oppressed people travelling under night have been numbering the stars for generations.  My mother calls me a certain number of times during any given week.

What an evocative question.  Can Black Feminism be quantified? 

Maybe.

I.

Black Feminism: A State/ment

Miriam (Duchess) Harris has a major accomplishment in her book Black Feminist Politics from Kennedy to Obama, a featured book in the Contemporary Black History series co-edited by the late Manning Marable for Palgrave Macmillan publishers.  Harris provides background on Black feminist discourses of the late 20^th century, including debates over films, texts, and the iteration of Black feminism as a category of analysis and organizing, in a number of contexts.  Focusing her study on the life of Black feminism as a possibility and a critique within presidential administrations from Kennedy to Obama in the United States, Harris begs the question of the impact of Black feminist politics on the structures of the state.

Keeping the question of state power more complicated than state recognition, Harris uses the work of commissions and the treatment of Black women within presidential administrations as an opportunity to point out the consistent lack of accountability to Black women (even those with high level political positions) within every presidential administration between late 20^th to early 21^st century (yes, including the Obama administration).  Harris’s analysis of Black women’s political participation, relationship to the Democratic party, treatment within the political structure, and expressed opinions in validated political forums (presidential commissions) that have included them is fertile ground for a few statements and more questions about whether the United States has the capacity to be accountable to Black women as a group or Black feminism as a practice.

So in what terms can Black feminism be (articulated)? When and why is it strategic for Black feminism to manifest itself in the terms of the state, a state, what state?

I am a Black feminist poet.  Except as a poetic proof of how the repetition of enslaving language frames the laws and mechanisms of the United States, the electoral and legislative structures of the United States have not attracted my specific and passionate attention.  I have made a political decision to prioritize the revolutionary work of creating our own institutions and building self-determination over the ongoing, related, and sometimes intersecting project of gaining recognition from the state.  Right now I am a reluctant participant in a genocidal political unit (the United States of America) that truly should not exist.  The question of state power and the symbolic power of the electoral process in the United States are complex questions for me to navigate as a queer abolitionist troublemaking Black feminist with anarchistic interplanetary tendencies.

I am a Black feminist poet with a line-break relationship to the death sentence of the state.  I am cultivating a life-making relationship to the statement.  For example here is a statement:

I am

a Black Feminist

Poet.

Ruthie Gilmore, abolitionist visionary, said at the 2011 Critical Ethnic Studies Conference that “we need to imagine an abolitionist state.”  In my understanding and practice, abolition is the political approach that says that enslaving institutions, centrally the prison industrial complex and the systems of surveillance and policing that keep it in place, cannot be improved, and must be destroyed, and that it is our collective responsibility to create structures that provide the preconditions of justice and freedom, i.e. a just and loving world where everyone has space, love, food, light, water and inspiration.  So being a Black feminist and an abolitionist seem almost redundant to me at this point, except as a poet invoking, repeating, and referencing my inspiration.

As a Black feminist abolitionist, the abolitionist state that I imagine when a Black woman genius named Ruthie Gilmore says to imagine a abolitionist state…is a Black feminist state.   For me the relationship between Black feminism and state power is the question of what kind of a loving, reparative, healing, and transformative state would a Black feminist consent to, nurture, co-create?

And how poetic would we have to be to even imagine it?   How many times a day would we think about food?  What would be the average intervals between hugs and declarations of love?  What would be the median ages in our intergenerational conversations? What would be the ratio of trees to people?

(to be continued…stay tuned for Black Feminism:  A Stat/istic? next week!)

 Get There:  A Review

Four Electric Ghosts: An Opera-Masquerade by Mendi and Keith Obadike

Four Electric Ghosts, the newest Opera Masquerade from digital, performance and conceptual artists Mendi and Keith Obadike, is the answer to the question of what we do now, dispersed over space, to collect our creative resources for resistance, to love our selves enough to act.   I was blessed to witness their most recent sold out show as part of UNC Chapel Hill’s Loading Dock Series at Memorial Hall.

The world is black.  The village is back.  From the first moment that the radiant quartet starts to groove our understanding moves down to include our hips and history. Story reaches up into song, down into soul, dances through your back, back to outerspace.   This is what we do around the cybernetic fire: tell the afro-futurist parables that can grow our spirits and possess our feet.

Imagine Ntozake Shange’s For Colored Girls was reincarnated inside a video game.   Imagine four colored girls, Red, Pink, Cyan and Orange dancing their way home in the land of the dead.   The story is narrated by Mendi Obadike, Karma Mayet Johnson and Latasha Nevada Diggs, a fierce trio of singing storytellers, reminiscent of a sultry soul act and embodied by glitter banded dancers.  Four Electric Ghosts  reprograms a narrative of sisterhood, collaboration, cultural appropriation, queer love interrupted,  ego squelched and spirits disturbed.

Based on the bright digital metaphor of the Pac Man game, and Amos Tutuola’s 1954 novel My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, Mendi and Keith use this performative form that mixes opera, masquerade, a soul music aesthetic, digital story and dance to bring Yoruba proverbs and a post-modern outerspace sense of longing into conversation.

This is Pac-Man re-envisioned from the perspective of the big-eyed ghosts who have to find a way deal with a faceless monster that will gobble up everything in its path masquerading innocence to an irresistible beat.  We know something about this.  We need this somehow.   We savor the proverbs stacked like sweets.   Who disturbs the wasp he stings.   Can’t use everyday medicine to cure a new disease.  The songs stay in our heads.  We are remembering something we already know, seeing it for the first time in the register of our sped up pulses and cybernetic desires for quick love and clarity.

Four Electric Ghosts is an invitation to dance in the present. (The cast invites members of the audience to get up and dance during the last number, but many of us were grooving all along.)  The songs that tell the story are from the radio station of my dreams, where love is complicated, learning is funky and ancestors are remembered.   The dances, choreographed by Paloma McGregor are the healing invocations that express the yearning of my scoliosis crooked back.

What I mean is, your body deserves this, your brain craves it.   Beg or borrow if you have to.  Steal the time away from whatever brilliance you are doing.   Imagine the charge you need, lighting up a black box near you, waking up your spirit, through your body and your brain.  And then do what it takes to get there.

“When you first realize your blood has come, smile; an honest smile, for you are about to have an intense union with your magic.”

“from Marvelous Menstruating Moments in Ntozake Shange’s book Sassafrass, Cypress and Indigo (As told by Indigo to Her Dolls as She Made Each and Every One of Them a Personal Menstruation Pad of Velvet)”

From Awkward to Abundant: A Community Supported Miracle

Next month my mother and I are launching the newest groundbreaking workshop in our Thicker Than Whatever: Unstoppable Mother/Daughter Relationshipsseries:  LoveOverflow: Marvelous Menstruating Moments!  This process has caused my mother and I to look deeply at what a black feminist personal political economy of menstruation might look like in our ideal communities. This workshop is our inspired practice towards transforming intergenerational silence and shame into action and power.  We love each other too much to make the awkwardness of talking about bodies, sexuality, gender identity and blood a barrier to our fully expressed support and love!  In order to make sure this beautiful day is accessible for free to the amazing visionary black mamas and daughters in our organizing community we are reaching out to our whole worldwide community to support the costs of this program.  If you love this idea and find it healing that this type of space can exist we’d love your support!  You can chip in here:

http://alexispauline.chipin.com/love-overflow-marvelous-menstruating-moments-mamadaughter-workshop

Beyond Books: Tangible Practices for Embodied Love

So when mamas across my organizing community in North Carolina started talking about their complex and juicy emotions about their daughters beginning their periods, often earlier than they had began theres and  one of the Indigo Afterschoolers started her period afterschool at my house (how lucky we were to have Sassafrass, Cypress and Indigo on hand to create a ritual right away!) what they spoke to was a need wider and deeper than a booklist.

Our Saturday program LoveOverflow comes from a core desire to create spaces to work through the questions, challenges and insecurities of all ages that the bright and deeply felt physical event of menstruation brings up in our communities.  We need rituals of ongoing affirmation.   So first Saturday in March my mom will be facilitating my mama comrades in working through the residual energy of their own early period experiences, their fears around their kids growing and changing and to create a mantra for everyday use that reminds them of their true love, passionate belief and inspired clarity about their daughters to refer to in hard times.   And I will be facilitating the younger folks, using art practices to draw through their questions, excitements and fears and helping them to individually create their own embodied and spiritual definitions of their menstruation experiences and rituals for how they want to honor themselves and create safe space monthly from here on out.   And THEN we will be bringing everyone back together for a ritual of affirmation, there will be circles and witnessing, lavender hand baths (our favorite), whispered poems and listening and love.   I know that this experience will be memorable for the participants and profoundly healing for my mother and I.

Not (Always) So Marvelous

My mama and I are so excited to bring our love and commitment (and the generative genius of Ntozake Shange’s words) to the community of black mothers and daughters here in Durham who have been bringing up the drama of the period…period of puberty and asking for support!  However when we started thinking about our own experiences blossoming into red, we realized that our first experiences and many subsequent experiences were not so marvelous, and for similar reasons.

I can’t quite remember my first period experience.  I know that I was about 14 and just starting high school.  Long ago in elementary school I had, along with my peers been giving a pretty illustrated book called “Period: A Girl’s Guide to Menstruation” and I remembered the affirming, reassuring and calming images from that book.   My first period experience was pretty painless, but after that I began to have intense-wake-you-up-out-your-sleep cramps.  I realize now that for years I ignored my own experiences of PMS, secretly wondering if I

a. needed a new life free from all of the people I knew

b. was experiencing the onset of one of the many mental illnesses in my mother’s psychology textbooks

Ultimately I assimilated my period as an intellectual experience without ceremony.  Like many other experiences since, my period was okay, and almost understandable because I had read about it somewhere.

It’s only this past weekend that I realized that my mother’s experience was similar to mine.  Growing up in Jamaica with an elderly grand-aunt who treated my mother’s period as something dirty to be ashamed of, my mother’s lifeline was a book that her mother sent.   My grandmother was a domestic worker in England paid to mother privileged white folks, and my mother remembers being upset and disappointed that all she had to help her through her transition and the complicated belts and napkins that accompanied it was this book.   She wanted her mother to be there herself to help her through.

And while I remember my mother being very sympathetic to the pain I endured (and continue to endure) on the first day of my period, we didn’t have many rituals or mechanisms to deal with the teenage angst and how impatient we could be with each other during period time at our house.   Luckily, we’ve learned a lot from our volatile journey through my teen years, and my mom now has stories full of advice to share with her therapy clients, all ending with something like..see and after all that my daughter still turned out great and we have a wonderful relationship today!

The bottom line is what our composite intergenerational period story shows is that ceremony and presence are key elements of the growing time of menstruation that we both longed for and are excited to make more possible and accessible in the lives of young people and their parents today.

A Gender Diverse Approach

Even though the participants in our upcoming workshop identify as black mothers and daughters, in this workshop it is important for us to honor the fact that gender is in transformation and that while some people see their period as a symbolic opportunity to reflect on “becoming women,” becoming ourselves is a more complicated and gender diverse experience.   Gender is unpredictable and people of many different genders can experience menstruation.   We want the participants in this workshop, especially the youth, to have access to the knowledge that menstruating can be part of a process of becoming an intentionally creative person who releases negative energy and creates time and rituals for love of self, period.  It does not have to be a feminine or feminizing experience unless that is what they want it to be.    Towards this end we are in the midst of a wisdom drive collecting insights that people of many genders have learned from their experiences menstruating.   If you are interested in sharing an insight for our LoveOverflow depth of wisdom pool please email us at lexandpauline@gmail.com with the subject “LoveOverflow.”

Again…if you love this idea, spread the word to folks you know to donate their wisdom and/or dollars to the project!

http://alexispauline.chipin.com/love-overflow-marvelous-menstruating-moments-mamadaughter-workshop

Love,

Lex

A lot of times, June Jordan couldn’t pay her phone bill.   I held the disconnection notices in my own hands, sitting hungry and enthralled in the Black Feminist poet, educator, revolutionary’s papers in the Schlessinger Archives at Harvard.

That morning I rode the train from my sista-friend’s grandma’s house in Roxbury, where she fed a block-full of cousins out of her amazing garden/urban orchard cattycorner from a poison-filled produce-empty cornerstore into Cambridge, where the police-violence-bought white privilege on the faces of the students and passersby made me want to slap a white person. Trust June Jordan to bring me to a place of rage.

I sat contemplating what set of circumstances allowed me to be sitting up at Harvard looking at June Jordan’s phone disconnection notices and folders filled with letters where people mentioned that they tried to call her but couldn’t get through.   And I thought of at least two things:

1. What immediately made my trip to Harvard to be the very first researcher to visit June Jordan’s papers possible, after harassing the kind archivists every day until they confirmed that the papers were processed and ready to view was the hospitality of Bonita’s grandma: an old Black food-growing woman who rarely left Roxbury, focused on feeding generations of her family love-grown food that might counteract the draining poison of Boston’s intense racial violence.
2. And the obvious gratitude goes to June Jordan herself, who believed that telling the truth, and being where her people and the future we deserved needed her to be was more important than knowing she could pay bills on time.   There were times she didn’t have food for herself and her son over everslow honoraria checks and writer’s fees.  She was honest about it in her collection Civil Wars.  A Black single mom not knowing if she could give her kid Christmas or even heat the apartment.

And the same love, risk, and accountability demonstrated by Bonita’s grandma and June Jordan is what makes this moment possible for me as a community-accountable scholar, teacher, and artist.   So what does this have to do with mentorship?

I am telling you this to explain why, in this forum on mentorship on a website created by and mostly read by Black Feminist university-engaged scholars, I am skipping over the many cherished mentors I have within the academy and the publishing and archiving worlds.  I am skipping over wonderful people who have raised me, fed me, affirmed and inspired me, to talk instead about the mentors with whom I have grown vegetables in the erstwhile tobacco dirt of North Carolina.   Today I am not focusing on my mentors who are nerd-famous uber-published senior named-chair Black Feminist academics and administrators (and who honestly complain in weary voices about how many of us young scholars demand their mentorship).  Instead, I am focusing on those mentors who have had such a major impact on my everyday life here in Durham and the decisions that have taken me to recreate the meaning of community accountable intellectual, spiritual love infused education and rooted artistry.

Today I want to tell you about Mama Nayo and Mama Nia, who I preface with “Mama” less for cultural nationalist throwback reasons than for the fact that like my mother, they are deserving of more respect then I can generate every time I say their names.   Mama. Because they have a rebirthing influence on my days, and these are the off-the-hook mentors I want to tell you about in the name of June Jordan’s disconnected phone.

Mama Nayo Barbara Watkins, now an ancestor, was a Black Arts South warrior and healer.  Power poet and acclaimed people’s playwright, she used interactive theater to facilitate communities telling the submerged histories of their own struggle and triumph.  She created an educational center for parents and children learning through learning disabilities in the name of her son.  She worked to make Black artists central to Alternate ROOTS, an arts and activism organization supporting Southern artists.   Mama Nia Wilson heads SpiritHouse, a local organization using arts-based interventions to lift up the spiritual and critical strategic leadership of the people most impacted by the prison industrial complex here in Durham, running a community center and several programs out of her home and scraping funds together to bring youth leaders around the country to learn about the connections between oppression and brilliance everywhere.

I am not writing this essay so that these mentors will know how much I love and admire them.  They already know.

Mama Nayo knows from the last days of her life when I watched the mainstream news with her during the Obama nomination process (and I hate the mainstream news, especially at election time) how I fed her dog (and I’m so allergic to dogs).  Only for Mama Nayo.   She knows from how I listened to her tell me about how she went into an old black woman’s kitchen on some voter registration activist mission and saw one of her very own broadsides up on the wall above the stove.  And how she listened to this old black woman talking about how she reads this poem, this black-woman-self-love-everybody-better-know-it poem, not knowing Nayo, who wrote the poem, was standing right there.  Saying “Yes.  You know that poem girl?  That’s my poem!”  She said it and Nayo always remembered and gave it to me to always remember now.   She knows from how I stood in line running errands at the oldest Black bank in Durham (Mechanics and Farmers) and the pharmacy dropping off checks and picking up the prescription that made her dying days less agonizing,  embodying family so the teller and the pharmacist would both say:  “You must be here for Nayo.  Nayo’s people.  Y’all sure do favor.”   She knows from her place on my altar, in my heart, in all the air that surrounds me.  She knows how happy I would be if one day someone compared me and my way and my work to her and her way and her brilliance.

And Mama Nia knows from the voicemail waiting on her phone right now, love messages early in the morning when we’re the only ones awake and on Facebook already.  Tulsi everydayness towards balance, towards you do not have to do it all yourself.  She knows that I praise the day we met in the street.  How I cry every time that her way too talented son plays the drum or gets impossibly taller or writes a poem.  How her daughter is a chosen sister who defends my life, love, and laughter, ready to take off her shoes and fight if she needs to.  She already knows how honored I am to have been working beside her in classrooms, clearings, courtrooms, living rooms in so many organizations and coalitions and committees for the past seven years and for as long into the future as I can imagine.   And since she too was mentored by Mama Nayo up to her very last day, she knows exactly that mentorship, and grandmentorship looks like exactly like love.

So this piece is not for Mama Nayo or Mama Nia, though they make it possible in my hands.  This piece is for you.  Because I want you to know.  Especially those of you Ph.D. or tenure-pursuant Black feminists seeking mentors.   I want you to know that my primary mentors here in my life who hold such sway over my decisions and the contents of my days, over what to write about and where to be, are Black women who were and are single moms using public assistance to free their time to free our people.

And I want you to know that because I want you to know that there is no bourgeois scarcity when it comes to Black feminist mentorship.  It is no use fighting each other or feeling like we have to compete for one of five tokenized mentors at the top who may be so stressed out by interim chairing two programs and half of a department that they should not be holding the whole task of mentoring you anyway.

The more mentors we have, in more places, the better off we are, lest capitalism trick us into believing that only the well-funded, institutionally connected, socially secure Black feminist intellectuals have gifts for our sharp, critical anti-capitalist lifetimes.

The fact that my abundant ecology of living and ancestral mentors includes moms using public assistance, broke filmmakers, struggling trans kids, non-profit divas, barely not starving poets and more is what makes it possible for me to live untrapped every day with infinite options for useful and fulfilling love-fueled brilliance.  This is what Audre Lorde meant when she pointed out that the only folks who are scared by the fact that “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house” are those who see the “master’s house (aka the university) as their only source of support.”   Through practice and through the lives of my many mentors I know the academy is not the only nor the primary source of support for my brilliance and that the tenure track is only one of infinite paths that a Black feminist can choose to take.

I have the deep luxury of not measuring my impact, success, and purposefulness on funding, tenure, bills paid on time–and I want that freedom for you.   Build a base of badass mentors that take different risks, make different sacrifices from each other, work in different conditions and with different styles.  Affirm the fact that your Black feminist brilliance could lead you anywhere, not just further into ivory privileges.  Let predictable sources write letters trying to find you.  Get off the hook, like June Jordan.  J

Love,

Alexis

P.S.  If you would like to be on the email notification list for ReMastered Brilliance, a new service I am starting to reconnect visionary underrepresented graduate students with their communities of accountability and a purposeful diverse ecology of brilliance, email me at brokenbeautifulpress@gmail.com.

Black feminism lives as an abundant and hopeful critique of our everyday circumstances. Black feminism lives as a perpetual readiness to engage and instigate transformation grounded in a deep love for our people and all oppressed communities.  Jessica Solomon, of the groundbreaking, healing performance collective the Saartjie Project, faced a moment for a Black feminist response, when she encountered a disturbingly racist and dehumanizing exhibit at the Crime and Punishment Museum in Washington, D.C., called “Dead Men Walking.”

In an email that asked “have we forgotten Troy Davis already?” Jessica shared her outrage at seeing young Black men in the D.C. streets in orange prison jumpsuits, hired by the Crime and Punishment Museum to promote a Halloween exhibit featuring an electric chair that had been used to kill 125 death row inmates. The stark image of these young Black men dressed for death in the wake of the publicized execution of Troy Davis and the long history of the disproportionate executions of Black men with very questionable evidence brought Jessica to action.

In support of Jessica’s call to action to hold this museum accountable for its use of death, oppression and in this case the bodies of young Black men in the D.C. area to glamorize one of the most tragic components of our society, and towards our continued responsiveness to institutions in our own communities, Jessica and I had this conversation:

Can you tell us about the encounter that sparked you to action?

On a Saturday afternoon this summer, I was exiting Gallery Place metro station with a friend when, in the midst of a busy intersection we spotted three men on orange suits in the distance.  I was a bit alarmed, and when I saw them passing out paper to a passerby, I became curious.  I walked up to a young man who could have been one of my former students and took a flyer.  It was a coupon for the Crime and Punishment Museum down the street.  I asked him why he was doing that, he laughed, shrugged and said “Its just a job, I don’t care.” It felt like he’d been asked that before.  “Its just a job”…

I totally get that. I’ve definitely taken jobs that I had to disconnect from to get through.  But orange jail suits?! I had to go to the museum and say…  something.  I walked in and asked to talk with someone about the orange suits.  I was approached by the Director of Operations, an older white man, who did not understand why I was there.  He told me “it was marketing” and swiftly directed me to a young black woman who worked at the gift shop.  She asked if I was “mad because they were African-American.”  “Sure, we can start there,” I said.  She went on to tell me how everyone wears the suits and that she’s worn it a few times.  “It’s the funniest thing,” she said, “once someone called the cops because they thought I was a real criminal!” It wasn’t funny and I wasn’t laughing.  I knew our conversation would only spiral from there so I thanked her and told her I understood that she was doing her job and that our conversation may look a little different outside of the museum.

How did you first encounter this museum?

I’ve known about the Crime and Punishment Museum for some time.  A few years ago I was speaking with a youth worker in Anacostia (think “Southside, USA”) who was trying to get free tickets to the Museum for her students.  And I wondered why she would take her youth on a “field trip” to see the things encased in glass they probably have already encountered in some negative way in their own communities?

Then, I heard about Holla Back DC’s! organizing working around the “Crimes of Passion” exhibit that glorified Domestic Violence. And then this summer I saw the orange jail suits.  Young black men, employees of the museum, dressed in their “uniform” – orange jail suits passing out coupons for the museum.

And now, here we are, with the “Fright at the Museum,”an exhibit featuring an electric chair used to kill some 100 plus people.  This was the straw for me.  I can’t ignore it or make shallow complaints anymore.

What inspired you to envision a Black feminist response to this institution? What are some of the influences that you see as resources to you and your collaborators in this process?

I give infinite thanks for the lessons I learned and lightworkers and organizers I met this summer at Indigo Days, Urban Bush Women’s Summer Leadership Institute, People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond, Highlander Center’s Cultural Workers Weekend and Alternate Roots.  No doubt I am influenced and fortified by those experiences.  I’m drawing on a deep history of building community, community engagement and visionary organizing.  I’m thinking about Troy Davis and the young people at juvenile detention centers who wear those orange suits everyday.  I’m thinking about my sisterfriends who’ve experienced domestic violence.

One of the things I bring to this work is the notion that we must critically love the institutions we’re a part of.  Granted, I am not affiliated with the Crime and Punishment Museum at all but through this framework of “critically loving” and questioning that which I’m a part of, I am able to:
1.  harness my anger and
2.  strategically engage with this institution via direct action to press for systemic change while
3.  dismantling the racist/sexist/violent machines that were been built long before the museum that validate its existence.

I put out a call for collaborators and our first meeting was Tuesday October 25, 2011.  I am full of emotions and questions and I am calling on all my ancestors!

What is the response so far and how can people get involved?

There has been a beautiful outpouring of support, outrage and a desire for action. Many people did not know what the Crime and Punishment Museum was up to and there are many people who have been organizing for some time.  I look forward to having all these people in the same room.

We are meeting in Washington, D.C. to figure out what folks are up to already, what resources do we have at our disposal and how can we move forward with both direct action and ongoing engagement for systemic change. Some folks are primed to protest and march and that’s great and necessary but we must offer a vision for a world we want where exhibits and places like this don’t exist.

In your initial email calling us to action about this, you mention that in the movement towards the world we deserve, we should create a living Love and Justice museum!  When can we start?! What will it include?

Ummm right now, please! Let’s see…  It would include optional hugs upon entry and music by Sweet Honey in the Rock and interactive Visionary Organizing exhibits, and a wishing well/ affirmation pool and lots of other goodies, co-created by the community, of course!

For more information please contact Jessica at jessica@thesaartjieproject.org.

June Jordan teaches that: “Love is lifeforce.”  And the healing power of love has saved my life more than once.  In the name of this truth, I affirm the arrival of Freeing Ourselves: A Guide to Health and Self Love for Brown Bois, a recent resource published by the Brown Boi Leadership project and written by masculine of center queer people of color and their allies.

I think of this resource guide as a chapter that should have been, but never would have been, in Our Bodies Ourselves or even in Jambalaya.   A resource that my partner, who identifies as a gender queer artist and a Black feminist boi, and our future children will probably not read cover to cover chronologically like I did, but will flip through, looking at affirming and beautiful photography, reading stories of how people we know and strangers survived trauma, transformation and the oppression of the medical industrial complex.    We will browse it for a list of self-advocating questions before finding a health care provider.   We will look at for options of how we want to get pregnant, what health issues we should look out for at different ages, how one gender affirming surgery differs from another one.   Freeing Ourselves is a non-linear invocation of a community of people with different needs, at different stages of life, with different approaches to their own wellness and wholeness who will interact with this book from where they are at, and then differently again at another moment.  It is a tiny, audience-specific, audience-accountable encyclopedia.

“We are working towards profound social change, knowing that there are no disposable people or communities.   We all need to be here.”

– Brown Boi Health Manifesto by Prentis Hemphill (119)

I affirm Freeing Ourselves as a poetic and practical statement against genocide.   At the book’s ending the manifesto makes clear, there are no disposable people.  But masculine centered queer of people of color, like all people of color, like all queer people and also by other people of color and by other queer people have been excluded and denied their place as valuable members of all of our communities.   They have been harassed in the bathroom, beaten in the streets, and silenced in their own given and chosen families.   The genocidal threat is that for generations inside white supremacy and colonialism, communities of color have suffered from the wider western insistence that there are only two genders, there is no spectrum, and that all people must either conform to a violent binary made up of two gender roles that serve to reproduce domination, or disappear.  This is genocidal, not only because of the deadly impact it has had on our people through suicide, hate violence and neglect, but also because it drowns out the traditions of our ancestral communities that precede the western binary and in which people have accessed the divine by transcending the strictures of gender.  I  also affirm an approach to queer masculinity that privileges love, because I believe it is our society’s best chance growing and nurturing masculinities without reproducing patriarchal power and violence.  I believe it is our best bet to collectively affirm our masculine and feminine and unnameable energies as love and more love in more forms.

Freeing Ourselves acknowledges the profound impact of the combination of systemic, interpersonal and internalized oppression in the lives of people living at the intersection of multiple gendered, raced, classed and sexualized oppressions who are looking for alignment and prioritizing a form of wholeness that is repeatedly invalidated.  It documents the impact of inept medical providers, internalized shame, and even stoic survival skills on the bodies, minds and spirits of the diverse people hailed by the term “brown boi.”

Brown Boi is an intentional alliteration, a poetic term that invites people of color who identify as masculine, who may be trans men, butch women, masculine people who do not identify with a gender that has a name in the western lexicon, people who identify strongly with one of the many genders named in indigenous cultures around the world, and people who are in a transformative state of redefinition, to affirm themselves and to come together to support each other and the communities and people they love.   The Brown Boi Leadership project explicitly advances the perspective that brown bois are crucial members of all communities of color and LGBTQTSGNC (Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Queer Two-Spirit and Gender Non-Conforming) communities because they are leaders, which means that we all benefit from their self-love and self-actualization.  Their access to their own power increases and catalyzes our collective strength.

So a book like this would have to be art, as evidenced by the striking portraits of Brown Bois laughing, injecting themselves, painted with words on their bodies, holding each other, having sex with each other, exercising, embracing their own pregnant bellies, looking at the camera, looking away, and the poetic definitions of wellness and vitality that jump off the pages.

Wellness Does not Equal Conformity

Among the powerful insights that Freeing Ourselves teaches with its content and its approach is that wellness does not equal conformity.   Using photographs and personal narratives from a compellingly diverse group of self-identified brown bois with different approaches to their own bodies and their masculinity, the guide encourages readers to create their own definitions of wellness and vitality in conversation with concrete examples and examinations of mental, physical and spiritual well-being and risks, instead of reproducing models of “health” that presume that everyone’s vision or goals for their body, mind and spirit are the same.    The guide could have taken this tendency further by including the voices of brown bois who identify as physically disabled and who could speak from a disability justice viewpoint about what wellness and vitality mean when one’s body is pathologized not only for gender non-conformity but also because of ableist oppression.

Keeping it Real: Collective Approaches, Systemic and Interpersonal Barriers to Wellness

I also appreciate the fact that this guide does not pretend that well-being is an individual pursuit impacted only by an individual’s eating or exercise choices and their decisions to engage healthcare providers.   The guide addresses the ways that immigration, poverty, trauma sexual violence, institutionalization, racism and appropriation of cultural forms of wellness compromise the wellness and vitality of brown bois and make their proactive pursuit of well-being on their own terms even more important.

Since well-being is not an individual problem, it also cannot be merely an individual achievement.  Freeing Ourselves is strongest when it encourages collective approaches to well-being by sharing the stories of survivors of violence who have created support circles and when it encourages the sharing of holistic health methods across cultures between diverse people of color as a way of building strength and community in a context where our traditions are often appropriated without accountability or reciprocity.

For All Of Us: The Importance of Self-Love for Collective Survival

Here on The Feminist Wire we have repeatedly spoken out against the harm that violent forms of masculinity visit upon the bodies minds and spirits of women of color.  For this reason it matters to me that accountability is a central piece of the Brown Boi health guide for trans-masculine people:

“To nurture our spiritual and emotional connections as trans-masculine people of color is a radical act of self-care.  This also includes learning to hold each other accountable and to confront unnecessary and harmful dynamics within our communities.” (30)

Self-care includes holding each other accountable because we are interconnected.  Loving ourselves includes learning how not to harm each other.    Loving ourselves includes disrupting violent patterns in our homes and in our community-building spaces.   First and last, I affirm this small black book as a vessel for love as accountability, wellness and profound connectedness. This is the love that will save our lives.