Tania Major

Joan Gibbs

This first appeared onbilerico.com


As an LGBTQ movement, we often think of multi-issue organizing and coalition building as perpetual desire, always forestalled to a future we're trying to get to...someday. The life of warrior Joan Gibbs, a black lesbian writer, editor, publisher, lawyer and activist, is a testament how PRESENT the boundary-breaking, interconnected work that we need is already alive in our community. Our understanding of our movement as broad, powerful, and nuanced depends on who we centralize as examples of what LGBTQ revolutionary organizing is.

I think we should start by remembering the name Joan Gibbs.

Joan Gibbs was born in Harlem, raised in North Carolina and has been fighting for racial justice since the 1960s when she was a high school student. The scene for the struggle for racial justice that Gibbs continues to fiercely inhabit has multiple scales. She fights on the scale of the nation to transform the current climate of immigration in the United States, and working with the Jericho movement to demand that all US political prisoners get free...right now.

Right now, Joan Gibbs is a radical lawyer, shifting the story of the
law towards the hope that it will break into someplace liveable for
all of us.
Right now, Joan Gibbs is the general counsel for the Center for Law
and Social Justice Center at Medgar Evers College in Brooklyn New York
and she is the project director of their Immigration Center.
Right now Joan Gibbs fights the letters that lockdown and exile the landless
P
A
T
R
I
O
T

Letter by letter.

None of us should be surprised by this.

All of us should find it natural, if not inevitable that Joan Gibbs
would be breathing life into misused sentences, opening space for
communities of purpose and vision.
We should remember that Joan Gibbs has been doing this all along. For
example, Joan Gibbs was one of the dreamers that dreamt up the first
conference for Third World Lesbian Writers. Joan Gibbs was part of the
Salsa Soul Sisters crew that revolutionized the New York City scene
with t-shirts, pins, and beautiful bold black and latina lesbian
visibility. Most important, we should remember that Joan Gibbs was
part of the Azalea collective, a group of self-declared "third world
lesbians" who created a literary magazine run based on shared power,
with rotating roles and a hands-off non-editing editorial style. And
we would certainly remember how Joan Gibbs co-compiled the
ground-breaking Top Ranking a collection of essays about racism and
classism in the lesbian community. Of course!

But maybe you didn't know any of that. I certainly didn't know who
Joan Gibbs was until less than a year ago AFTER I took it upon myself
to search archives, basements, offices and ebay for any published
trace of the diverse and powerful movement that lesbians of color
created in the 1980's.

What does it mean, that the name Joan Gibbs isn't remembered and
restated daily within conversations about lesbian herstories in the
United States? If Joan Gibbs was our central heroine we would be much
more likely to remember the interconnected flows of sexuality and
migration. We would remember that our struggle as queer folks is not
limited to the terms of citizenship. It is about how love moves
everywhere, and how the law denies it.

As an editor Gibbs refused to confine the words of other lesbians
within the confines of her own writing style. So it is no surprise
that she continues to fight against the ways the increasingly
draconian laws enforced by the Department of Homeland Security seek to
constrain the lives of people struggling to survive on the margins of
US society.
If we are a movement that claims to be inclusive that seeks to address
multiple oppressions through a fierce history of fighting back, then
Joan Gibbs is the perfect emblem of how queer politics, and especially
a queer creative ethic, must push on the language and the law at once.
Finding a way to honor the struggles, needs and rights of all the
people, especially immigrants in a post-911 state is a poetic act. How
do we honor the inherent contribution of everyone in our society when
the law would name so many of us "illegal"?

Joan Gibbs emphasizes the poetics of queer politics, an aesthetic that
lives also in the work of cross-cutting organizations that recognize
the links between migration, sexuality, class and state violence.
Southerners On New Ground (www.southernersonnewground.org), Queers for
Economic Justice (q4ej.org), the Audre Lorde Project (alp.org) and the
Sylvia Rivera Law Project are all organizations that are doing the
work that Joan Gibb's life exemplifies.
But the name "Joan Gibbs" is not ringing from the rooftops. It will
have to be enough for now that her name echoes of the walls and limits
of this post in excess, reminding us that there are warriors still
among use who are living the change we need.

Joan Gibbs is a warrior because her life is a lesson in how movement
looks, and where freedom lives. Our creative attention to structures
of captivity is more necessary now than ever.

for alexis from alexis: honoring alexis de veaux

by Alexis Pauline Gumbs

deify
the thing within
all of it

-from "Poem for the Poet Alexis De Veaux" by June Jordan

What a blessing when we can call our heroes by our own names!

I am writing this on a Sunday, giving thanks for the name, Alexis, meaning helper of all humanity. Giving thanks for Alexis De Veaux who teaches me that I am not the first one called to the task.

Alexis De Veaux, black lesbian feminist poet, playwright, scholar, teacher, and publisher has been dressing this old planet in her new words for decades. Alexis De Veaux is a warrior because she insists that if we have space or time to breathe or write it is because we have made it, demanded it and built it ourselves. The first words I heard someone use to describe Alexis De Veaux was "brilliant black feminist". This was from her mentee Mark Anthony Neal who credits Dr. De Veaux with inventing and calling into being the black male feminism he strives to live. The second description I heard was "brave". Cheryll Greene, who has been close friends with De Veaux for years, explained that Alexis De Veaux was always determined to live as an artist, even when that meant risking everything. And it does. Every time.

Alexis De Veaux has published about a half dozen books with well known literary presses including several books of poetry and a groundbreaking biography of fellow black lesbian feminist poet and teacher Audre Lorde. She is now the chair of the Global Gender Studies Department at the State University of New York in Buffalo. And I celebrate the way the world honors and rewards Dr. De Veaux's priceless and crucial contribution to literature and literary studies.

But today is Sunday, and I've long since stopped going to church. So I have to give thanks in my own way. Today I want to talk about the miracles that the world forgets. Because for artists, especially black lesbian visionaries, staying true to purpose means choosing integrity over security day by day. Alexis De Veaux teaches me to remember that a world worth living in is not one that can be bought into. The world worth living in is the one that we make.

Alexis De Veaux is a warrior. For example, in the bleak Reagan years which marked the end of the short period in which writing by black women was in high literary demand, De Veaux refused to allow the cold shoulder turned by publishers and the conservative limits of the National Endowment for the Arts to end the black feminist literary project that was her home. If institutional racism sought to silence the voices of black women, De Veaux countered by creating institutions. De Veaux opened up her Brooklyn apartment to young women of African descent and facilitated a writing circle called the Gaptooth Girlfriends, a group of women who grew together as writers and published their own work in anthologies with the same name. During the same period De Veaux and her partner at the time Gwendolyn Hardwick started a performance group called The Flamboyant Ladies which hosted brunches, made t-shirts and made space for discussions as complicated as the particular stake of black communities in the movement against nuclear war.

As long as Alexis De Veaux had a place to live, the black feminist literary movement had space to grow. And having a place to live (in New York City) is no simple victory as an independent artist. Strategically, in the 1980's, Alexis De Veaux used her talents as a writer to work for Essence Magazine, a popular lifestyle and fashion magazine which reaches a market of millions of black women. Talk about making miracles happen in the least likely places. Essence Magazine, bastion of the normative black family was (and is) more committed to selling beauty products than to sparking a worldwide black revolution. But against the odds, Alexis De Veaux and Cheryll Greene turned the conservative 1980s in to the most radical decade the magazine has ever seen. De Veaux celebrates the fact that with the support of editor Susan Taylor, she and Greene were able to bring a level of consciousness to the magazine that went further than the feminists magazines of the time, not to mention the mainstream press. With the help of fellow writers Toni Cade Bambara and June Jordan they reported on the struggles and victories of black people in Zimbabwe, Haiti, Nicaragua, Cuba, South Africa and all over the United States, encouraging the women who subscribed to the magazine (and their daughters who secretly read it too...like me!) to think about black solidarity in terms much wider than the United States and much more substantive than electoral politics. As De Veaux explains "We were talking about black diasporic community long before that phrase became popular."

And it never stopped. Alexis De Veaux is still challenging readers and students to expand their minds and to understand the political importance of every situation, and every word we use.

Alexis De Veaux is a warrior all the more worthy of praise because she is still here three of the black womyn warriors who I have mentioned in this post (Audre Lorde, Toni Cade Bambara, June Jordan) have already become ancestors too soon. But Alexis De Veaux is alive, in every sense of the word and she takes her responsibility to the past and to the future seriously. Alexis De Veaux is alive.

Give thanks. Give thanks. Give thanks.
Ashe.

Composure: Karla Holloway

Composure
(for Karla Holloway)

if hope made fabric
like its own style of weaving
like the thick strength of soft
you'd be wearing it

if grace published dance steps
like shoeprints to keep going
like a sure turn to here
you'd be walking it

if beauty released a soundtrack
like bone structured bass-line
or a stretched sketch in ink
you'd be humming it

and
if bright put on a light show
with a symphony of leaves
and a reservoir of stays
i'd guess that you had
composed it.
_______
Karla Holloway is the William Kenan Professor of English and African and African American Studies at Duke University. Please read everything she's written as soon as you can.

This is part of a series of poems and collages called The Listening Project.

Nia Wilson

Nia
(for Mama Nancy)

your face is a playground
for things that grow
or that want to
and
your hands are gardens
for all that flies

your cheekbones are support beams
for everything fierce
everything wild
that tends toward love

i think your arms
must be passageways
to homes thought impossible
to marooned desires

i think your skin shares
a freckled map
of endless mines
of water prepped
for communal baptism

********
Nia Wilson is Director of SpiritHouse

This comes from a series of poems and collages called The Listening Project.

Kai Lumumba Barrow

Training
(for Kai)
if fun house mirrors
and loose sunk chains
could speak out loud
and scratch toward move

if curled archives
stacked under urgency
colored in spilled desire
were on display

if brown maps
stretched directions
of more than now
of sticky lifting
left calling cards

if revolution
had a whole car tag
a muralled rush

i could hear that
i could see it
i could recognize all of it
trained in the practice
of knowing you

**********

Critical Resistance is one of the many places that Kai makes revolution.

This is part of a series of poems and collages called The Listening Project.

Aisha Peay

for Aisha


i think you carve

your statements

into iron

round and solid

sounds of knowing


or maybe you shake

sand and gravel

through hardcover wings

firmly out towards yes


i would call you

a subtle detective

or a calm and self-sufficient

rescue mission

looking for what


i believe

we all

need
________
Aisha Peay is a doctoral candidate in English and Women's Studies at Duke University. Her dissertation focuses on black feminist anthologies. She has helped me find a place to live in more than one way.

This is part of a series of collages and poems called The Listening Project: A Poetics of Relation.

Treva Lindsey

for Treva

glamour
has a code
rhythm-based
like morse

urgent
like the bottom
of a hard-spoken
tone

critique
fortifies itself
with costumes
such that
the visual
beomes lyrical
allusion

to the song
yet to be
penned

or the dance
we should be
stretching for

all ready

_____

This is part of a series of poems and collages called The Listening Project: A Poetics of Relation.

Alisha Gaines: Shuck n' Strategy

for Alisha

Clearly

clearly
some of us
were made
for TV

some of us
can animate
the mundane

some of us
speak flat spaces
into declarative
remixing ruts
into interrogatives

some of us
open our hands
so minstrel spirits
fall through
and recolor
the everyday making
of same

at least one us
clearly

_______
Alisha Gaines is a doctoral candidate and instructor of English and African American Studies at Duke University. Her dissertation focuses on liberalism and passing in the 20th Century US. She also writes brilliantly on black masculinities and makes Micheal Jackson and the color yellow even cooler than they already were.

This is part of a series of poems and collages documented at The Listening Project: A Poetics of Relation.

Monica Miller

for Monica Miller

imagine landing
through some accidental decisions
on a ground of blossoms
dispersed upward in peals

or try
pushing yourself forward
finding that doorways
have names and gifts
that unstring
the need for striving

or maybe
there is a sharp
upward note
asymptote of conclusion
that when projected
with a hand to frame
wins everything
before wanting

what i mean to say is
when i wrote this
i was sitting
in the place i sat
at the moment
i decided
to go to the school
where i never knew
i would meet you

so therefore
miracles
are
______
Monica Miller is a professor of English and Africana Studies at Barnard College. Her book on black dandyism is forthcoming from Duke University Press. She makes it look easy to be as miraculous as we are.

This is part of a series of poems and collages. To see the whole set see The Listening Project: A Poetics of Relation.

Deborah Small: Break the Chains

for Deborah

like rubber-souled
stairsteps
or gavels with ridges
your voice builds
platforms
thick enough
for rollerskates

and in rhythm
with the last sigh
of the first bus home
your hand pulls
the seal
off the waiting punch-line
for the joke we're living

as a curled up
surprise for a
world in the wings
and a secret passageway
to the part of the story
when all the walls fall down

so
i know what happens
when a link bursts open
and steel reveals
its internal edges

i can see
the mosaic
of rubble painted clear
so I know what it means
that Deborah is here

every break
every chip
every slip
and mistake

gets a new life
and smoothed space
to grow

****************
Learn more about Deborah's organization Break the Chains

This is part of a series of poems and collages by Alexis Pauline Gumbs. To see the whole project go to The Listening Project: A Poetics of Relation.

Farah Jasmine Griffin

for Farah Jasmine Griffin

it could be
that bright paper
intentional folds
and stolen staples
are deceptively long term
propellers that
wing awake in our chests

it could be
that sound has its own
sweepstake calculus
that listening is the prize
when our eyes
close

it could be
that teaching is a faith
in rebirth
not through a doctrine
of more selves
but in rays of growth
frames of reflection

and
it could be
that I had
already known
all of these things
somehow

but it is
necessary
to say it

it is crucial
to say

that the first time
i heard
and recognized
each of those
truths

it was you
who was speaking

_______
Farah J. Griffin is a Professor of English and African and African American Studies at Columbia University. She is the author of and Who Set You Flowin' , Beloved Sisters and Loving Friends and If You Can't Be Free Be A Mystery. Something about the way Farah told me about Kitchen Table Press eight years ago gave birth to the obsessive research that still shapes my everyday.

This is part of a series of poems and collages by Alexis Pauline Gumbs. To see the whole series go to The Listening Project: A Poetics of Relation.

Phillis Wheatley: Something Like a Seance

The Difficult Miracle (where June Jordan meets Phillis Wheatley)

This is part of a series of collages and poems by Alexis Pauline Gumbs. See the rest of the seires at The Listening Project: A Poetics of Relation.

Born in June

to June (Jordan)

either the accident of my birth
starts in the miracle of your name
or the intention my word
lives in the groove of the same

laugh
and
say
both

and else you brave vulnerability
leaves me soaking in salt
then each essay builds trapeezes
for my heart to sing

and again you
shake your head
both

thus from an honest body
choosing anything now
light define of alive

i say "yes"
and know

***************
Studying June

This is part of a series of poems and collages by Alexis Pauline Gumbs. To see the entire series go to The Listening Project.

mama audre: generate light

for audre lorde (to be whispered in hurricane season)

mama audre
how did you no
facing gale
force consent

to plant letters
like collard seeds
who new how
to ride wind
dispersing into
breath?

who did you
make
a line less birth
certificate
tracing from
Grenada
to St. Croix
to New Orleans
a bee-line
designed to clog machinge guns
an oracle
fashioned from scraps
of cloth and ink?

"i wish
you were living

(up the road)"

and
i
no
that
you
are
********************
This is part of a series of poems and collages by Alexis Pauline Gumbs. To see the entire series go to The Listening Project.
Basic information on Audre Lorde

Loving Audre

The Intimacy of Praise: Wahneema Lubiano

for Wahneema

attention gains wings
outfits
land
from the way you listen

like a magnetic lift
a secret spring
that firms eye contact
into a place to be

what was glass ceiling
becomes sturdy
to rest books on
past our reach

or foam legos
get born out
your phrases
placing each into
soft frames for knowing

in other words
i was never going to stay
with one metaphor
so thanks
for building
the slide

Wahneema Lubiano is a Professor of African and African American Studies, Literature and Women's Studies at Duke University. She is also the author and in person speaker of words that will blow your mind everytime. Despite all of this, she is the most generous teacher I have met.
_____________
This is part of a series of poems and collages by Alexis Pauline Gumbs. To see the entire series go to The Listening Project.

Hard Core: for Tina Campt

for Tina Campt

you make me think
it might be appropriate
to brainstorm with chisels
to rock-climb bare-handed
to say what i mean

when you look up
and nod forward
it's a head-butt to the last thought
and a measured faith in a desired now

as if you intend
abundant stones
to stand on
to test
to break through
to shape down to movement

like spinning a record
but much more
(hard core)

Tina Campt is a key figure in critical black diaspora studies and a Professor in Women's Studies and History at Duke University. She is one of the organizers of the Diasporic Hegemonies Conference Series and was also co-organizer of Reconstructing Womanhood: Beyond Empire, a conference in honor of Hazel Carby.

____
This is part of a series of poems and collages by Alexis Pauline Gumbs. To see the entire series go to The Listening Project.

The Intimacy of Praise: Maura Bairley

for Maura

if days had missions
cloaks, clocks and magic wands
so that peace was
a structured quest into faith

or if those barbed points
of intersection
met a quilted place
a made space
of meant limits
in soil-planted yes
fertile like a subtly voiced spell

and if i came upon this pathway
charted with the markings
of hand after hand
lovingly printed into earth

i would look north
i would look east
i would look west
i would look south

knowing that somehow
you had done this

___________________
Maura has built the Sexual Violence Prevention and Response Program at Columbia University
out of love and more love.
Read more about the program here

This is part of a series of poems and collages by Alexis Pauline Gumbs. To see the entire series go to The Listening Project.

The Intimacy of Praise: Cheryll Y. Greene

for Cheryll

for an adolescent eternity
which might have been a year
my dream
was to be editor
of Essence Magazine

to write in the spirit
of glamour and buffed brownness
to cushion the impossible success
such that soft would not mean empty

i remember sitting on a train
maybe fifteen years old afterschool
and releasing that plan
into tight puffs of change
airborne as the radioactivity of not knowing

and when i let drop that image
of myself
in a suit
holding always glossy pages
and breathed in the possibility that
anything might be waiting
that words had their own story
and black shapes to space looped
a miracle always yet untold

i was having one of the moany
self-crashing
scattering faith moments
that might have made me ready
might have let me deserve
might have helped me want
to know you one day

Cheryll Y. Greene, along with comrade Alexis DeVeaux, was the architect of a intervention into the politics of Essence Magazine that used the fashion magazine as a platform to publish incisive and revolutionary work about the black diaspora between 1979-1985 . Cheryll Green is also the former managing editor of SOULS the Journal of the Institute for Research in African American Studies at Columbia University and is currently a visionary editor and artist blessing the world with her crucial cuts and her expansive spirit.

This is one of a series of collages and poems Alexis Pauline Gumbs did as part of the Listening Project. Click here to see the full series.