via impulsive acts
What follows is a statement that UBUNTU created for its use of NO! as a community outreach and educational tool. You may find it helpful to share with students and viewers as you use this important film in your teaching.
Because we...:
NO!
The UBUNTU education working group has chosen to use NO!, Aishah Simmons’ groundbreaking film about sexual violence in African-American communities because it exemplifies, informs and pushes our struggle to create a world that is free of sexual violence and full of community accountability and a sustaining, transformative love.
This is our collective reasoning for using this film and our vision for its impact on our communities.
NO! Because we love this film. Because this film is made up of warriors showing up for their own liberation, starting with Aishah Simmons, a survivor who created this film through 10 years of sustained community work to raise awareness about rape. Because the stories of survivors of sexual assault are powerful and sacred. Because there are survivors here. Because this story speaks to and for all of us. Because this story pushes us beyond words. Because this story has the power to heal. Because men need to be aware of the effects of sexual assault. Because this lets you know what you need to know fast. Because you have shown up and you will recognize your own fears and experiences here with a new clarity. Because you have shown up and you have survived and you are not alone. Because this film will make you think about sexual assault in your own community and in your own life. Because the history of sexual assault matters. Because you have shown up and this film might provoke you to demand and create your own freedom. Because this film can make you recognize your own situations and your own actions. Because this film will remind you that you can act. Because this film is brave and honest about fear and asks us to be brave and honest with each other. Because this film is real and encourages us to be real in this space. Because this film can push us all to acknowledge and share our emotions. Because this brings this issue home to all of us. Because this film insists that all oppression is connected. Because this film holds us all accountable for the world that we comply with and perpetuate. Because this film encourages us to change the way we respond to sexual assault on an institutional level. Because this film shows us how to hold our communities accountable without always buying into the flawed legal system. Because this film is about responsibility and not blame. Because this film teaches us something new every time. Because this film shapes and propels our analysis and our action. Because this film demands that we reimagine the whole world. Because we believe that the best place to make a new world is right here, together, with you.
So we challenge you as you watch this film to see yourself, your own fears and your own responsibility. This film is not about other people. This film is not about some pathology that is unique to the black community. This film is a specific and necessary examination of the manifestations of sexual assault in black women’s lives, but it calls all of us to recognize our own survival, our own silence, our own complicity, our own violence and our shared responsibility to create a world that honors us.
love,
UBUNTU Education Working Group
Showing posts with label booklust. Show all posts
Showing posts with label booklust. Show all posts
Saturday, May 17, 2008
Always: The Queerness of a Reproductive Frame
via littleblackbook
The Combahee River Collective Statement, Kitchen Table Press (1977)
Need: A Chorale for Black Women's Voices, Audre Lorde, Kitchen Table Press (1979, 1991)
I am Your Sister: Black Women Organizing Across Sexualities , Audre Lorde, Kitchen Table Press(1984)
Cultural Identity and Diaspora, Stuart Hall (1990)
Piece of My Heart: A Lesbian of Colour Anthology (Introduction), Makeda Silvera, SisterVision Press (1991)
Punishing Drug Addicts who Have Babies: Women of Color, Equality and the Right to Privacy, Dorothy Roberts, Harvard Law Review, (1991)
Big Boots Zine (2001-2003)
Always. Like the word between love and your name in a love letter. Always. Like the pastel plastic promise that your period can become cute. Always. Like an ahistorical historicization. Like the production of eternity without witnesses. Like a recurring nightmare of hoping you exist.
This essay, informed by the works above is the place where "always" splits. Always become all ways and family, heritage and reproduction become an appropraited means for photocopying the zine quality black print of the new world in the basement of the university at 3 o'clock in the morning.
Seriously. I have been tripped up by the meaning of "reproduction" and the persistance of models of family and heritage that show up in works that I find to be foundational to my queer reading practice. What to make of this? Well...why not make what I usually make...an illegally printed freely distrubuted copyright defiant interactive publication. (click on the brokenbeautiful press link to your right). That is to say what if the central metaphor for reproduction was not the heteronormative biology of predictable birth into property and was not mechanism through which capital generated blindness and a surplus...but was rather (in a very Benjaminian "Author as Producer" type of way) a photocopy machine, illegally used for a purpose against capital. A performative mechanism, making multiplicity that called into question the unity and coherence of the status quo and that had the lovely biproduct of making words and images defer/difffer (yes. in the Derridian sense as Hall mentions) from themselves...becoming ever darker, ever grainer, ever less able to refer back to something true...because of their relationship to darkness and light and the means of production.
Can that machine that is used to make the status quo again and again be used to make something else? And that machine is the photocopier and that machine is also the idea of ancestry (hear Etheridge Knight...on ancestry...on Me'shell Ndgeocello's Cookie the Anthropological Mixtape...and while you're at it think of the burned CD as reproductive theft...and while you're there remember that the references in this essay are a glass bottle family tree) and family and the possibility of producing a future, and the idea of being connected to a past.
In other words, what does it mean that Big Boots, my favorite women/transfolk of color post-punk zine starts with an issue (that I love) on mother's and daughters called (so that I cannot avoid this) "ancestry"? What does it mean that in Audre Lorde's "I am Your Sister" the lesbian warrior poet frames her entire analysis in the structue of family? What does it mean for the Combahee River Collective, foundational black lesbian activists, warn against biological determinism in terms of gender while being able to claim what "Black women have ALWAYS embodied...resisted"? And what does it mean for Makeda Silvera, founder of SisterVision Press to come along about 15 years later and agree "We have always existed" and "our children will know who we are"? Race, motherhood, generations and the production of the future are central to each of these queer projects...so are they...not queer?
And what about Alexis? Radical queer girl to the core who is avowedly obsessed with her mother and grandmothers and who even dreams about bald pregnancy and waterimmersed childbirth at least tri-weekly. Is she not...queer? What to make of the way she claims the very texts she is writing about now as legacy, roots....even inheritance. (I saw her buy some out of print original copies of the Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press Feminist Organizing Pamphlets Series just this week!)
Well. Since unqueering my whole world is absolutely out of the question let's try this. Remember the photocopier. What if always split into all ways makes a way out. In I am Your Sister, I would argue, Lorde frames herself as reproductive not only through her status as a biological mother of black children, but also through her mentoring of poets, her publication of books, her illegal "public art" vandalist fieldtrips with other black lesbian mothers. So what if this approach to making...to producing art out of opposition towards a liveable future by embattled and indeed often illegal means is also reproduction. Stolen. That is to say, since reproduction is a means of theft to begin with (a means of making property, a means of owning the bodies of women, a means of reinforcing an existing labour hierarchy) does the stealing of reproduction (a context from which queers are excluded from and by) reveal something fundamental, a switch on which flip the script of power? Think of this especially in the contexts of Roberts essay which argues that for black women's reproduction...their actual choice to ever give birth...is criminalized under the law in this coundtry. Reproduction in this sense is not something other than reproduction but rather the repetitive performative act based on a long lost, repressed, supressed past and looking towards a future of unlikely liberation, the proof of the lie of an eternal status quo in which we are oppressed and owned.
If so what does this have to say about the function of reproduction in the narratives of nation and diaspora? What does it mean for Audre Lorde to write "Need", strongest statement I can find against the consequences of the way that women are used and owned and raped and beaten and killed towards the building of a masculinist black subjectivity (that i would call nationalist) and frame the statement as one that enables black women to build nation. What would nation have to mean for that to make sense? (asha bandele spoke about nationalism in similar terms at the Urban Tea Party during the 2005 National Black Arts Festival in ATL GA) Ferguson might be interested in this idea of nation that refuses the heteropatriarchal.
But do you see what I mean about this pressure on words...this distance from originality? So when Stuart Hall defines diaspora as that which produces and reproduces itself again and again while at the same time insisting on Derridain differance and arguing that diaspora cannot be an attachment to a unitary past, what can he mean. Aside from his schematic constructions (scarily close to that of the creolistes) of the Americas as the child of/land of the procreative meeting of Africa and Europe I think he means diaspora can be a process of zine production and distrubution...through which the violence of dispersal becomes a relationship to the means of production that suggests an alternative.
The Combahee River Collective Statement, Kitchen Table Press (1977)
Need: A Chorale for Black Women's Voices, Audre Lorde, Kitchen Table Press (1979, 1991)
I am Your Sister: Black Women Organizing Across Sexualities , Audre Lorde, Kitchen Table Press(1984)
Cultural Identity and Diaspora, Stuart Hall (1990)
Piece of My Heart: A Lesbian of Colour Anthology (Introduction), Makeda Silvera, SisterVision Press (1991)
Punishing Drug Addicts who Have Babies: Women of Color, Equality and the Right to Privacy, Dorothy Roberts, Harvard Law Review, (1991)
Big Boots Zine (2001-2003)
Always. Like the word between love and your name in a love letter. Always. Like the pastel plastic promise that your period can become cute. Always. Like an ahistorical historicization. Like the production of eternity without witnesses. Like a recurring nightmare of hoping you exist.
This essay, informed by the works above is the place where "always" splits. Always become all ways and family, heritage and reproduction become an appropraited means for photocopying the zine quality black print of the new world in the basement of the university at 3 o'clock in the morning.
Seriously. I have been tripped up by the meaning of "reproduction" and the persistance of models of family and heritage that show up in works that I find to be foundational to my queer reading practice. What to make of this? Well...why not make what I usually make...an illegally printed freely distrubuted copyright defiant interactive publication. (click on the brokenbeautiful press link to your right). That is to say what if the central metaphor for reproduction was not the heteronormative biology of predictable birth into property and was not mechanism through which capital generated blindness and a surplus...but was rather (in a very Benjaminian "Author as Producer" type of way) a photocopy machine, illegally used for a purpose against capital. A performative mechanism, making multiplicity that called into question the unity and coherence of the status quo and that had the lovely biproduct of making words and images defer/difffer (yes. in the Derridian sense as Hall mentions) from themselves...becoming ever darker, ever grainer, ever less able to refer back to something true...because of their relationship to darkness and light and the means of production.
Can that machine that is used to make the status quo again and again be used to make something else? And that machine is the photocopier and that machine is also the idea of ancestry (hear Etheridge Knight...on ancestry...on Me'shell Ndgeocello's Cookie the Anthropological Mixtape...and while you're at it think of the burned CD as reproductive theft...and while you're there remember that the references in this essay are a glass bottle family tree) and family and the possibility of producing a future, and the idea of being connected to a past.
In other words, what does it mean that Big Boots, my favorite women/transfolk of color post-punk zine starts with an issue (that I love) on mother's and daughters called (so that I cannot avoid this) "ancestry"? What does it mean that in Audre Lorde's "I am Your Sister" the lesbian warrior poet frames her entire analysis in the structue of family? What does it mean for the Combahee River Collective, foundational black lesbian activists, warn against biological determinism in terms of gender while being able to claim what "Black women have ALWAYS embodied...resisted"? And what does it mean for Makeda Silvera, founder of SisterVision Press to come along about 15 years later and agree "We have always existed" and "our children will know who we are"? Race, motherhood, generations and the production of the future are central to each of these queer projects...so are they...not queer?
And what about Alexis? Radical queer girl to the core who is avowedly obsessed with her mother and grandmothers and who even dreams about bald pregnancy and waterimmersed childbirth at least tri-weekly. Is she not...queer? What to make of the way she claims the very texts she is writing about now as legacy, roots....even inheritance. (I saw her buy some out of print original copies of the Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press Feminist Organizing Pamphlets Series just this week!)
Well. Since unqueering my whole world is absolutely out of the question let's try this. Remember the photocopier. What if always split into all ways makes a way out. In I am Your Sister, I would argue, Lorde frames herself as reproductive not only through her status as a biological mother of black children, but also through her mentoring of poets, her publication of books, her illegal "public art" vandalist fieldtrips with other black lesbian mothers. So what if this approach to making...to producing art out of opposition towards a liveable future by embattled and indeed often illegal means is also reproduction. Stolen. That is to say, since reproduction is a means of theft to begin with (a means of making property, a means of owning the bodies of women, a means of reinforcing an existing labour hierarchy) does the stealing of reproduction (a context from which queers are excluded from and by) reveal something fundamental, a switch on which flip the script of power? Think of this especially in the contexts of Roberts essay which argues that for black women's reproduction...their actual choice to ever give birth...is criminalized under the law in this coundtry. Reproduction in this sense is not something other than reproduction but rather the repetitive performative act based on a long lost, repressed, supressed past and looking towards a future of unlikely liberation, the proof of the lie of an eternal status quo in which we are oppressed and owned.
If so what does this have to say about the function of reproduction in the narratives of nation and diaspora? What does it mean for Audre Lorde to write "Need", strongest statement I can find against the consequences of the way that women are used and owned and raped and beaten and killed towards the building of a masculinist black subjectivity (that i would call nationalist) and frame the statement as one that enables black women to build nation. What would nation have to mean for that to make sense? (asha bandele spoke about nationalism in similar terms at the Urban Tea Party during the 2005 National Black Arts Festival in ATL GA) Ferguson might be interested in this idea of nation that refuses the heteropatriarchal.
But do you see what I mean about this pressure on words...this distance from originality? So when Stuart Hall defines diaspora as that which produces and reproduces itself again and again while at the same time insisting on Derridain differance and arguing that diaspora cannot be an attachment to a unitary past, what can he mean. Aside from his schematic constructions (scarily close to that of the creolistes) of the Americas as the child of/land of the procreative meeting of Africa and Europe I think he means diaspora can be a process of zine production and distrubution...through which the violence of dispersal becomes a relationship to the means of production that suggests an alternative.
Slaves Makin' Slaves
via littleblackbook
Das Kapital, Karl Marx, 1867
"Governmentality", Michel Foucault, 1978
"Do you want more?" The Roots 1995
The Repeating Island: The Caribbean and the Postmodern Perspective,
Antonio Benitez-Rojo, 1996
Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction and the Meaning of Liberty,
Dorothy Roberts, 1997
Making Men: Gender, Literary Authority and Women's Writing in
Caribbean Narrative, Belinda Edmonds, 1999
"Diaspora and the Passable Word", in The Practice of Diaspora, Brent
Edwards, 2003
"The Resistance of the Object: Aunt Hester's Scream" in In the Break,
Fred Moten, 2003
Oxford English Dictionary Entries: "diaspora", "disperse",
"immigrate", "produce", "production", "reproduce", "reproduction",
"terror", "trauma".
(read the archives of www.okayplayer.com or see
http://www.artistdirect.com/nad/store/artist/album/0,,1689791,00.html?src=search&artist=%3Fuestlove
if by the end of the post the title still perplexes you)
I've been wanting to explain diaspora through an impossible sonic
planetary art installation. Here's how it goes. The next person who
tries to compare diasporas (like Jewish, Black, Caribbean,
Argentinian, Laotian) or equates diaspora with privileged migration or
(god-forbid) vacation becomes the sculpture. This person immediately
leaves whatever building we are in and stands in a public place
screaming. This person continues screaming until they drop dead
(while being fed through an IV to prolong this process). Just keeps
screaming. Can never stop screaming. And even then 1% of the rage,
pain and loss that characterizes what I mean when I say diaspora has
not been expressed. I assign this to the next contestant to save
myself from having live that scream myself.
Let's see if it works.
So last time (always) I was talking about the relationship between reproduction, oppression and the appropriation of the means of reproduction (like the photocopier.) Which makes sense...since I am obsessed with paper and ink, BUT even then I was compelled to refer to Meshell's "Cookie: The Anthropological Mixtape" so...given the presence of Moten and the advent of CD's called mixtapes at around the median publication date of the texts above...let's talk about this in terms of sound.
A remark: There are black people all over the world. If I don't hear them screaming it is only because I am blinded with the brilliance of their skin as it resists the marking of capitalism.
What is the relationship between reproduction, capital, race, diaspora and freedom? According to Marx capital reproduces itself through labor power, reproduces the capitalist character of the relations by reproducing the worker as a wage-earner. I think there is a silenced black woman somewhere in that statement saying what about what I make (enslaved, at home, on welfare NOT EARNING WAGES)? What about what I make? Babies marked and crossed out because with my race it's said I pass on oppression...like its natural and like I own it somewhere. What about what I make? The scream I take with stolen air naming this world that spins itself around the truth that I can be raped...so all can be raped...again and again and again.
The Roots always always include a hidden track on their records. In 1995 it was a sonic performance piece featuring Philadelphia spoken word poet Ursula Rucker called the "Unlocking". Some hip hop heads decide to gang-rape some girl. Some girl decides that this is not happening again. Some girl kills everyone with the stregnth of her words and the sound of her gun. There is a silenced black woman somewhere in here.
So why is it that Fred Moten, brilliantly explicating and riffing on the invaginated, screaming, gendered, impossible maternal moment that is the source of black radical performance that sceams value before/against exchange, does not ever say RAPE? Why is it that Antonio Benitez-Rojo claims that his is a non-sexist argument and then feminizes the Caribbean as a womb, inseminated by blood that gives and gives and gives and repeats and repeats and repeats into somesweet/nasty/gushy stuff that he finds "between the gnarled legs" of some old black women in Cuba and does not say...RAPE? Why is it that
even Belinda Edmonds, intent on not reproducing the feminized Caribbean landscape (but calling African-Americana, the Anglophone Caribbean and Africa "nations" quite easily) can talk about a "willing white woman" who is gang-raped, and a non-speaking black servant who can only be raped without pausing to tell us what do you mean by RAPE?
Belinda why when you introduce an original (and usually quite brilliant) idea do you say "I submit ________". What can your
submission mean here? Even Brent Edwatds cannot save us now. This is not a failure of translation. None of these are passable words for what is going on and on. The gulf that I am speaking across is shaped by repression, is the censored public secret that my body can be owned and used by someone else at any time. There is a silenced black woman
somewhere in here.
Listen. Diaspora is the STATE of RAPE. What is it about this violent, recurring, theft of livelihood, expropriation of land, walking on black women's bodies, over the possibility that we will create, that is silent even when present? Stand there. Keep screaming. Keep screaming. The character of capitalism witnessed and ignored again and again is rape. The experience of diaspora is the violent dispersal that scatters subjectivity, that disappears the subject; it is the trauma of rape. So how is the terror that is this global state contained?
Foucault says that governmentality is the mentality that has us think that the only thing to debate is how the government governs, deflecting any impulse to question the state (of things) itself. Therefore we are reproducing the state of rape by refusing to acknowledge it as such, as unnacceptable as a human relation. Can anyone hear this? Our dominant mode of relation on this planet is rape! Why should we be trying to understand this? As Edmonds points out even Lamming has accepted this violence (rape as such) as some precondition for decolonization. So what about what I make?
Talk to me. What can I say, what can I make that destroys the logic of the machine...that does not reproduce a relation that I cannot afford...a relation that we all silently survive?
How you sound? Will there ever be a sound structure on which this girl can stand? Let me know that you are listening...
Das Kapital, Karl Marx, 1867
"Governmentality", Michel Foucault, 1978
"Do you want more?" The Roots 1995
The Repeating Island: The Caribbean and the Postmodern Perspective,
Antonio Benitez-Rojo, 1996
Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction and the Meaning of Liberty,
Dorothy Roberts, 1997
Making Men: Gender, Literary Authority and Women's Writing in
Caribbean Narrative, Belinda Edmonds, 1999
"Diaspora and the Passable Word", in The Practice of Diaspora, Brent
Edwards, 2003
"The Resistance of the Object: Aunt Hester's Scream" in In the Break,
Fred Moten, 2003
Oxford English Dictionary Entries: "diaspora", "disperse",
"immigrate", "produce", "production", "reproduce", "reproduction",
"terror", "trauma".
(read the archives of www.okayplayer.com or see
http://www.artistdirect.com/nad/store/artist/album/0,,1689791,00.html?src=search&artist=%3Fuestlove
if by the end of the post the title still perplexes you)
I've been wanting to explain diaspora through an impossible sonic
planetary art installation. Here's how it goes. The next person who
tries to compare diasporas (like Jewish, Black, Caribbean,
Argentinian, Laotian) or equates diaspora with privileged migration or
(god-forbid) vacation becomes the sculpture. This person immediately
leaves whatever building we are in and stands in a public place
screaming. This person continues screaming until they drop dead
(while being fed through an IV to prolong this process). Just keeps
screaming. Can never stop screaming. And even then 1% of the rage,
pain and loss that characterizes what I mean when I say diaspora has
not been expressed. I assign this to the next contestant to save
myself from having live that scream myself.
Let's see if it works.
So last time (always) I was talking about the relationship between reproduction, oppression and the appropriation of the means of reproduction (like the photocopier.) Which makes sense...since I am obsessed with paper and ink, BUT even then I was compelled to refer to Meshell's "Cookie: The Anthropological Mixtape" so...given the presence of Moten and the advent of CD's called mixtapes at around the median publication date of the texts above...let's talk about this in terms of sound.
A remark: There are black people all over the world. If I don't hear them screaming it is only because I am blinded with the brilliance of their skin as it resists the marking of capitalism.
What is the relationship between reproduction, capital, race, diaspora and freedom? According to Marx capital reproduces itself through labor power, reproduces the capitalist character of the relations by reproducing the worker as a wage-earner. I think there is a silenced black woman somewhere in that statement saying what about what I make (enslaved, at home, on welfare NOT EARNING WAGES)? What about what I make? Babies marked and crossed out because with my race it's said I pass on oppression...like its natural and like I own it somewhere. What about what I make? The scream I take with stolen air naming this world that spins itself around the truth that I can be raped...so all can be raped...again and again and again.
The Roots always always include a hidden track on their records. In 1995 it was a sonic performance piece featuring Philadelphia spoken word poet Ursula Rucker called the "Unlocking". Some hip hop heads decide to gang-rape some girl. Some girl decides that this is not happening again. Some girl kills everyone with the stregnth of her words and the sound of her gun. There is a silenced black woman somewhere in here.
So why is it that Fred Moten, brilliantly explicating and riffing on the invaginated, screaming, gendered, impossible maternal moment that is the source of black radical performance that sceams value before/against exchange, does not ever say RAPE? Why is it that Antonio Benitez-Rojo claims that his is a non-sexist argument and then feminizes the Caribbean as a womb, inseminated by blood that gives and gives and gives and repeats and repeats and repeats into somesweet/nasty/gushy stuff that he finds "between the gnarled legs" of some old black women in Cuba and does not say...RAPE? Why is it that
even Belinda Edmonds, intent on not reproducing the feminized Caribbean landscape (but calling African-Americana, the Anglophone Caribbean and Africa "nations" quite easily) can talk about a "willing white woman" who is gang-raped, and a non-speaking black servant who can only be raped without pausing to tell us what do you mean by RAPE?
Belinda why when you introduce an original (and usually quite brilliant) idea do you say "I submit ________". What can your
submission mean here? Even Brent Edwatds cannot save us now. This is not a failure of translation. None of these are passable words for what is going on and on. The gulf that I am speaking across is shaped by repression, is the censored public secret that my body can be owned and used by someone else at any time. There is a silenced black woman
somewhere in here.
Listen. Diaspora is the STATE of RAPE. What is it about this violent, recurring, theft of livelihood, expropriation of land, walking on black women's bodies, over the possibility that we will create, that is silent even when present? Stand there. Keep screaming. Keep screaming. The character of capitalism witnessed and ignored again and again is rape. The experience of diaspora is the violent dispersal that scatters subjectivity, that disappears the subject; it is the trauma of rape. So how is the terror that is this global state contained?
Foucault says that governmentality is the mentality that has us think that the only thing to debate is how the government governs, deflecting any impulse to question the state (of things) itself. Therefore we are reproducing the state of rape by refusing to acknowledge it as such, as unnacceptable as a human relation. Can anyone hear this? Our dominant mode of relation on this planet is rape! Why should we be trying to understand this? As Edmonds points out even Lamming has accepted this violence (rape as such) as some precondition for decolonization. So what about what I make?
Talk to me. What can I say, what can I make that destroys the logic of the machine...that does not reproduce a relation that I cannot afford...a relation that we all silently survive?
How you sound? Will there ever be a sound structure on which this girl can stand? Let me know that you are listening...
little girl parts or i may not get there with you
via littleblackbook
Hamlet Prince of Denmark, William Shakespeare (Whenever and Ever Amen)
The Black Jacobins, C.L.R. James, 1938, 1968
Pan-Africanism or Communism, George Padmore, 1971
The Production of Space, Henri Lefevbre, 1974
Monsters and Revolutionaries: Colonial Family Romance and Mestissage, Francoise Verges, 1999
Against Race: Imagining Political Culture Beyond the Color Line, Paul Gliroy, 2000
The Karma of Brown Folk, Vijay Prashad, 2000
Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment, David Scott, 2004
Race, Rape and Third Wave Feminism, Toni Irving, 2004
Uncovering Stories; Politicizing Sexual Histories in Third Wave Caribbean Women’s Literature, Donette A. Francis, 2004
“Black is Country”: Race and the Unfinished Struggle for Democracy, Nikhil Pal Singh, 2005
AND
(yeah it's been a long time...i shouldnta left ya)
Song of Solomon, Toni Morrison, 1977
Betsey Brown, Ntozake Shange, 1985
Louisiana, Erna Brodber, 1994
Daughter, Asha Bandele, 2003
Pink Icing, Pamela Mordecai 2006
Inventory, Dionne Brand, 2006
I've been wondering (since back when the term actually applied): What does it mean to sacrifice a virgin? Why does that make enough sense to even be said often enough that you recognize it. I suspect it holds a place in the language of the familiar/l because it is actually going on. Now.
I have to think about this because I just realized something that scares me and that might scare you. In two(many) parts:
1. The rage, the anger that I carry around, that I try to still in classroom on buses and everywhere looks to me like an inevitable explosion, starting in my body and moving through the buildings to the structure of the planning and the breaking of the planetary orbit. I see it. Splinters of everything flying away from the sound that I cannot make.
2. I just realized that the referential image for this visualization of my rage, my terror(ism) is that formative image that my dad passed on (driving to birmingham without warning when i fell asleep in the car one day) it's the 16th Street Baptist Church blowing up, It's my little girl parts that I can't afford, can't hold, can't save. That's the image. My anger can't be contained.
So this is me. Trying not to become a suicide bomber. Or this is the study for a poem that I have to write. In Song of Solomon, the book that made me feel like I was falling into the ocean the first time I read it. The book that made me refuse to straighten my hair the second time I read it. This book that I am reading for the third time because of a random phone call that I shouldn't have taken... In Song of Solomon, Guitar, the quiet terrorist, the reverse nationalist, the unspoken sound, is charged with avenging the murders of these same four little girls, blown up in the 16th Street Baptist Church. I don't trust him to do it right though, because he says that even though the black woman is a pathological life draining mess, he has to avenge her "Because she is mine." I am nervous to conversations of property. Especially since Guitar is ready to rob three people who he qualifies as "women" when his friend misnames them as people to get the money to buy the bombs. Especially since he craves "legal tender" which he says "sounds like a virgin bride" to fund this project. Especially since Morisson equates committing murder to losing your virginity in this text, in reference to this man, Guitar, who is the second smartest character (Pilate is first) who a part of me wants to love...but I can't afford...these little girl parts. What does it mean to sacrifice. A virgin.
Especially since Morrison allows Corinthians to elaborate on the meaning of being owned, displayed like property and then splayed like whores in Babylon as the meaning of being a black daughter of a man who owns things (and people). Especially since I know this is the same act. I guess I should be explicit. Especially since I was sexually assaulted (sacrificed as a virgin) by someone who would have then and would probably now describe me as his...in a similar sick way. So what is the use of these little girl parts, of the sacrifice of virgins to the sense of a black liberatory narrative? Why do they need it?
In The Black Jacobins, that romance that tragedy of choosing between impossible choices, that tragedy (validated through Hamlet who finds the world too pregnant and hates women because they make men tragic through seduction and reproduction--according to David Scott) of "colonial enlightenment" that produced Caribbean intellectuals as conscripts of impossible desires and inevitable failures...little girl parts, the possibility that a girl can keep her body together is completely foreclosed. C.L.R. James, just finished arguing for West Indian Self-Government on strange and racist terms, tells this story beautifully. With an exception. Rape, when it shows up in the narrative, has to be part of a list of abuses suffered by the androcentric slave community all at once. Sex that is forced upon black and mulatto women is at best "seduction" by amoral slave owners and whites. One man insults another "man" by seducing his wife. By making her willing. By choosing the word seduction James is making her willing. And in a further move, unforgivable, he suggests that slave women were really fighting for (poisoning each other for) the chance to be "seduced" by the master. Sacrificed like versions of what? for the sake of lasting narrative of revolutionary struggle, of the rise of a man who was "master of himself" only because some things (it will seem) can always be owned, always be bought. Like those little girl parts...that body that I can't afford to keep. I want to ask the qustion that David Scott asks of this text in a different way. If Scott usefully, brilliantly asks that we use the mode of tragedy to realize the impossibility of vanquishing contingency, in the impossibility of predicting what we will really want, if we really are still alive, how do we make our desires loud? How do we resist the seduction of the predictable narrative that holds together partly because I'm not human enough to be included. This explains Toni Irving's article on the fact that black women are trained to know that when we speak about the violence that we have experienced we wil not be believed, we disrupt the narrative. Little girls are sposed to hush...
I mean literally. These little girl parts explode the narrative. Remember this. The civil rights movement led up to the brilliant and beautiful March on Washington, featuring the King who could see the mountaintop. And they blew up the church on Sunday during Sunday school, they sent the little girl parts flying into my my breaking faith AFTER that. AFTER that. I heard James Baldwin's voice break at the specificity "In a christian nation. On Sunday morning. IN A CHURCH. They do this..." Nothing is sacred, but somethings are set apart, like the sacrifice of virgins, making sense. An advisor of mine, Karla Holloway, asked me to be suspicious of the term coherence, of whose term that was. She reminded me that it really was not mine (add this to the list of things that I cannot afford). So now I have to name my own as the position that coherence excludes.
"Black is a Country", Nikhil Singh's readable and useful and wonderful account of the "unfinished struggle for democracy" points out the collaborations of the narrative of liberal economics and nationalist universalism in a way that I need. He does it in a way that I thank him for. But there is a growing list of things that I cannot afford (that he can afford?) and his book is only possible when I am amputated. I should have known when I noticed that the title quote is from my least favorite book of essays by Amiri Baraka..'Home"...the book that I literally wrote my senior thesis against...the violent domestication of black women (in the sanctified place that is going to blow up) that I cannot afford. I should have known but as usual I underestimated context (i can be a bad reader in the service of hope and Gilroy does it too...i'll come back to that). So the seamless slick narrative of black freedom discourse passed from man to man, and (as he explained) the way that this place tried to fool us into thinking that race was parenthetical he literally made gender parenthetical at at least two points in the text and then actually says that gender became an issue in the last chapter with the Panthers, despite Ella Baker...somehow. His students tell me he is thinking about that. They tell me that he repents. But the problem is that he had to do it..to make a book. He had to, to make a narrative that could hold. That couldn't hold the problematic little girl parts.
Franciose Verges admits that it will always have to happen in the next book. Her book on the family narrative of colonialism and the trajectory of emancipation struggles in Reunion could not include the experiences of colonized women...it will have to be another book she says. It will have be contained somewhere else. What does it mean to be set apart (into the sacred space that will be sacrificed first) , set apart onto the front lines. Dr. Verges and I once had a very strange and very short conversation about Condoleeza Rice and she said "It's something about the black woman destroying the black man. It goes back to slavery." I couldn't keep listening, for fear I would see Moynihan channelled, for fear I would lose the insights she had given about the relationship between rape and war. Really because I started to see those splinters in my head when I blinked. And I didn't want to explode the house of whichever kind faculty member's home I was in. And further..beacuse I can't be social under the specter of Conde. Conde is the epitome of what it means to sacrifice those little girl parts (that invevitability of power) and at the same time the even scarier violence of their recuperation. Carol Boyce Davies gave a talk last week in Toronto in which she pointed out the deadly irony of Conde (growing up IN Birmingham when girl parts were scattered right there right there everywhere) uses her proximity to say that she knows something about terror, she makes an exchange that I cannot afford, using her proximity to this explosion to turn black girls into soldiers, sending them into explosion demanding the form some form of themselves without little girlness, sending them to kill all the little girls in the world. A war on terror. God. I can't afford this. See how it explodes out?
So where is the hope (if not in the church). Gilroy (my fellow bad reader in the service of hope) sees it in technological innovation (which is where everyone sees it right?) arguing in Against Race that the move from blood and bones as the low tech house of rape into genetic penetrability makes a difference that affirms the exceptionality and the universal ethics that emanates from the killing of not quite racialized racialized people or something. But to do that he has to say that blood and bones and the place were race is marked and reproduced, which is difference from the genetic in a fundamenal way. He also has to say that through time we have moved from relative inpenetrability to technovisual penetrability. So he has to in other words, cut out the girl parts that were penetrable from the beginning (he actually says that somehow Micheal Jordan is more penetrable than Sartje Baartman was, she who was sacrificed exactly for and as the penetrability of stolen girl parts) AND say that the organs through which race is produced are neutral bones and blood and not the womb, the mark of the mother which reproduces race and social condition as one (in the time of slavery) and which is linked (even in his analysis) to the cellular reproduction of cervical cancer patient Henrietta Lacks towards genetic narratives that perpetuate social conditions by claiming to explain them genetically.
So I cannot afford to hope that race is finally over, or some such thing. I have to with Lefebvre say that a new social condition requires a new space (thus the explosion in my head again and again). That space is made and pointed to and furnished by Asha and Erna and Ntozake and Pamela and Dionne who insist on and insist on little black girl subjectivities, little black grils in pieces who deserve to be loved, who deserve the whole world. Little black girls whose experiences animate a critique of the police state that is black women held in place, and forced and sacrificed while virgins. Little black girls whose minds explode past death into the stories and desires of other black women. Little black girls who find new vantage points fr viewing a world that we thought was used up. Little black girls who suffer the trials of eight year old vulnerability for the simple joy of unjustified unownable pleasure. Little girls who count every single loss and happiness like it is theirs to hold. So really maybe the battle is in that exploding church, splintering my brain again and again. In the embattled belief that I am actually here even if no one admits this. In the inexcusable need to hold books while knowing that they may never be able to hold me....
Hamlet Prince of Denmark, William Shakespeare (Whenever and Ever Amen)
The Black Jacobins, C.L.R. James, 1938, 1968
Pan-Africanism or Communism, George Padmore, 1971
The Production of Space, Henri Lefevbre, 1974
Monsters and Revolutionaries: Colonial Family Romance and Mestissage, Francoise Verges, 1999
Against Race: Imagining Political Culture Beyond the Color Line, Paul Gliroy, 2000
The Karma of Brown Folk, Vijay Prashad, 2000
Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment, David Scott, 2004
Race, Rape and Third Wave Feminism, Toni Irving, 2004
Uncovering Stories; Politicizing Sexual Histories in Third Wave Caribbean Women’s Literature, Donette A. Francis, 2004
“Black is Country”: Race and the Unfinished Struggle for Democracy, Nikhil Pal Singh, 2005
AND
(yeah it's been a long time...i shouldnta left ya)
Song of Solomon, Toni Morrison, 1977
Betsey Brown, Ntozake Shange, 1985
Louisiana, Erna Brodber, 1994
Daughter, Asha Bandele, 2003
Pink Icing, Pamela Mordecai 2006
Inventory, Dionne Brand, 2006
I've been wondering (since back when the term actually applied): What does it mean to sacrifice a virgin? Why does that make enough sense to even be said often enough that you recognize it. I suspect it holds a place in the language of the familiar/l because it is actually going on. Now.
I have to think about this because I just realized something that scares me and that might scare you. In two(many) parts:
1. The rage, the anger that I carry around, that I try to still in classroom on buses and everywhere looks to me like an inevitable explosion, starting in my body and moving through the buildings to the structure of the planning and the breaking of the planetary orbit. I see it. Splinters of everything flying away from the sound that I cannot make.
2. I just realized that the referential image for this visualization of my rage, my terror(ism) is that formative image that my dad passed on (driving to birmingham without warning when i fell asleep in the car one day) it's the 16th Street Baptist Church blowing up, It's my little girl parts that I can't afford, can't hold, can't save. That's the image. My anger can't be contained.
So this is me. Trying not to become a suicide bomber. Or this is the study for a poem that I have to write. In Song of Solomon, the book that made me feel like I was falling into the ocean the first time I read it. The book that made me refuse to straighten my hair the second time I read it. This book that I am reading for the third time because of a random phone call that I shouldn't have taken... In Song of Solomon, Guitar, the quiet terrorist, the reverse nationalist, the unspoken sound, is charged with avenging the murders of these same four little girls, blown up in the 16th Street Baptist Church. I don't trust him to do it right though, because he says that even though the black woman is a pathological life draining mess, he has to avenge her "Because she is mine." I am nervous to conversations of property. Especially since Guitar is ready to rob three people who he qualifies as "women" when his friend misnames them as people to get the money to buy the bombs. Especially since he craves "legal tender" which he says "sounds like a virgin bride" to fund this project. Especially since Morisson equates committing murder to losing your virginity in this text, in reference to this man, Guitar, who is the second smartest character (Pilate is first) who a part of me wants to love...but I can't afford...these little girl parts. What does it mean to sacrifice. A virgin.
Especially since Morrison allows Corinthians to elaborate on the meaning of being owned, displayed like property and then splayed like whores in Babylon as the meaning of being a black daughter of a man who owns things (and people). Especially since I know this is the same act. I guess I should be explicit. Especially since I was sexually assaulted (sacrificed as a virgin) by someone who would have then and would probably now describe me as his...in a similar sick way. So what is the use of these little girl parts, of the sacrifice of virgins to the sense of a black liberatory narrative? Why do they need it?
In The Black Jacobins, that romance that tragedy of choosing between impossible choices, that tragedy (validated through Hamlet who finds the world too pregnant and hates women because they make men tragic through seduction and reproduction--according to David Scott) of "colonial enlightenment" that produced Caribbean intellectuals as conscripts of impossible desires and inevitable failures...little girl parts, the possibility that a girl can keep her body together is completely foreclosed. C.L.R. James, just finished arguing for West Indian Self-Government on strange and racist terms, tells this story beautifully. With an exception. Rape, when it shows up in the narrative, has to be part of a list of abuses suffered by the androcentric slave community all at once. Sex that is forced upon black and mulatto women is at best "seduction" by amoral slave owners and whites. One man insults another "man" by seducing his wife. By making her willing. By choosing the word seduction James is making her willing. And in a further move, unforgivable, he suggests that slave women were really fighting for (poisoning each other for) the chance to be "seduced" by the master. Sacrificed like versions of what? for the sake of lasting narrative of revolutionary struggle, of the rise of a man who was "master of himself" only because some things (it will seem) can always be owned, always be bought. Like those little girl parts...that body that I can't afford to keep. I want to ask the qustion that David Scott asks of this text in a different way. If Scott usefully, brilliantly asks that we use the mode of tragedy to realize the impossibility of vanquishing contingency, in the impossibility of predicting what we will really want, if we really are still alive, how do we make our desires loud? How do we resist the seduction of the predictable narrative that holds together partly because I'm not human enough to be included. This explains Toni Irving's article on the fact that black women are trained to know that when we speak about the violence that we have experienced we wil not be believed, we disrupt the narrative. Little girls are sposed to hush...
I mean literally. These little girl parts explode the narrative. Remember this. The civil rights movement led up to the brilliant and beautiful March on Washington, featuring the King who could see the mountaintop. And they blew up the church on Sunday during Sunday school, they sent the little girl parts flying into my my breaking faith AFTER that. AFTER that. I heard James Baldwin's voice break at the specificity "In a christian nation. On Sunday morning. IN A CHURCH. They do this..." Nothing is sacred, but somethings are set apart, like the sacrifice of virgins, making sense. An advisor of mine, Karla Holloway, asked me to be suspicious of the term coherence, of whose term that was. She reminded me that it really was not mine (add this to the list of things that I cannot afford). So now I have to name my own as the position that coherence excludes.
"Black is a Country", Nikhil Singh's readable and useful and wonderful account of the "unfinished struggle for democracy" points out the collaborations of the narrative of liberal economics and nationalist universalism in a way that I need. He does it in a way that I thank him for. But there is a growing list of things that I cannot afford (that he can afford?) and his book is only possible when I am amputated. I should have known when I noticed that the title quote is from my least favorite book of essays by Amiri Baraka..'Home"...the book that I literally wrote my senior thesis against...the violent domestication of black women (in the sanctified place that is going to blow up) that I cannot afford. I should have known but as usual I underestimated context (i can be a bad reader in the service of hope and Gilroy does it too...i'll come back to that). So the seamless slick narrative of black freedom discourse passed from man to man, and (as he explained) the way that this place tried to fool us into thinking that race was parenthetical he literally made gender parenthetical at at least two points in the text and then actually says that gender became an issue in the last chapter with the Panthers, despite Ella Baker...somehow. His students tell me he is thinking about that. They tell me that he repents. But the problem is that he had to do it..to make a book. He had to, to make a narrative that could hold. That couldn't hold the problematic little girl parts.
Franciose Verges admits that it will always have to happen in the next book. Her book on the family narrative of colonialism and the trajectory of emancipation struggles in Reunion could not include the experiences of colonized women...it will have to be another book she says. It will have be contained somewhere else. What does it mean to be set apart (into the sacred space that will be sacrificed first) , set apart onto the front lines. Dr. Verges and I once had a very strange and very short conversation about Condoleeza Rice and she said "It's something about the black woman destroying the black man. It goes back to slavery." I couldn't keep listening, for fear I would see Moynihan channelled, for fear I would lose the insights she had given about the relationship between rape and war. Really because I started to see those splinters in my head when I blinked. And I didn't want to explode the house of whichever kind faculty member's home I was in. And further..beacuse I can't be social under the specter of Conde. Conde is the epitome of what it means to sacrifice those little girl parts (that invevitability of power) and at the same time the even scarier violence of their recuperation. Carol Boyce Davies gave a talk last week in Toronto in which she pointed out the deadly irony of Conde (growing up IN Birmingham when girl parts were scattered right there right there everywhere) uses her proximity to say that she knows something about terror, she makes an exchange that I cannot afford, using her proximity to this explosion to turn black girls into soldiers, sending them into explosion demanding the form some form of themselves without little girlness, sending them to kill all the little girls in the world. A war on terror. God. I can't afford this. See how it explodes out?
So where is the hope (if not in the church). Gilroy (my fellow bad reader in the service of hope) sees it in technological innovation (which is where everyone sees it right?) arguing in Against Race that the move from blood and bones as the low tech house of rape into genetic penetrability makes a difference that affirms the exceptionality and the universal ethics that emanates from the killing of not quite racialized racialized people or something. But to do that he has to say that blood and bones and the place were race is marked and reproduced, which is difference from the genetic in a fundamenal way. He also has to say that through time we have moved from relative inpenetrability to technovisual penetrability. So he has to in other words, cut out the girl parts that were penetrable from the beginning (he actually says that somehow Micheal Jordan is more penetrable than Sartje Baartman was, she who was sacrificed exactly for and as the penetrability of stolen girl parts) AND say that the organs through which race is produced are neutral bones and blood and not the womb, the mark of the mother which reproduces race and social condition as one (in the time of slavery) and which is linked (even in his analysis) to the cellular reproduction of cervical cancer patient Henrietta Lacks towards genetic narratives that perpetuate social conditions by claiming to explain them genetically.
So I cannot afford to hope that race is finally over, or some such thing. I have to with Lefebvre say that a new social condition requires a new space (thus the explosion in my head again and again). That space is made and pointed to and furnished by Asha and Erna and Ntozake and Pamela and Dionne who insist on and insist on little black girl subjectivities, little black grils in pieces who deserve to be loved, who deserve the whole world. Little black girls whose experiences animate a critique of the police state that is black women held in place, and forced and sacrificed while virgins. Little black girls whose minds explode past death into the stories and desires of other black women. Little black girls who find new vantage points fr viewing a world that we thought was used up. Little black girls who suffer the trials of eight year old vulnerability for the simple joy of unjustified unownable pleasure. Little girls who count every single loss and happiness like it is theirs to hold. So really maybe the battle is in that exploding church, splintering my brain again and again. In the embattled belief that I am actually here even if no one admits this. In the inexcusable need to hold books while knowing that they may never be able to hold me....
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