I can already tell that I’m going to have to write about this collage more than once. because the messages keep coming. #audreonthemainline

But since tomorrow we will be diving into the interview “Above the Wind” and writing together about “Audre Lorde and the Idea of the Community Accountable Intellectual,” I’ll start with the detail of a brick wall.

For me the brick wall in this collage (emerging out from under the water and the mosaic) represents Audre Lorde’s relationship to the city and the university. From all accounts, Audre Lorde was never well behaved at school, but she did a lot of it. And her relationship with the City University started with her time as a student at Hunter High School for Girls. And after graduating from Hunter College and Columbia University she worked for the City University of New York in many different capacities. She (along with June Jordan, Toni Cade Bambara and Adrienne Rich) worked for the SEEK program, an access program preparing students from under-performing high schools for college level work. She taught teachers at Lehman College, she taught cops at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, she taught poetry at Hunter College. It was at the City University of New York’s Second Sex Conference where she told her racist white feminist colleagues that “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” It was a CUNY building where she looked out the 17th floor window and processed her nightmares and the nightmares of her students in one of the first “Blackstudies” courses ever (which she reflects on in the poem “Blackstudies.”) As the first Black faculty member in John Jay’s English Department, she taught their first courses on institutionalized racism, to student cops with loaded weapons in full uniforms and co-taught their first women’s studies classes. I think about the brick wall in relationship to the pillows at the bottom of the collage, and what June Jordan describes in her memorial tribute to Audre Lorde as their shared support of students of color protesting for open admissions and relevant Black and Puerto Rican curriculum at City University. They brought food and blankets, comfort and teach-ins to those students determined to transform the brick walls of their university, their city. And one day Hunter College would name their women’s poetry center after Audre Lorde. And yet, when she proposed a teaching schedule that would keep her from cold New York winters so she could better fight the cancer in her body, she was denied. It was Audre Lorde herself who said “our labor has become more important than our silence” in her poem “A Song for Many Movements,” and indeed despite her singular voice, the university where she had offered decades of transformation to generations of students in multiple fields, required more labor than her body could give. So ultimately she left the City University and the city itself and moved to St. Croix where she created the community accountable practice we’ll be studying tomorrow night. Sometimes, institutionally, you come up against a brick wall. And then what? For me, part of the ceremony of this collage is to operationalize Lorde’s typewriter, envelopes, breathing into the actualization of portals beyond the brick walls of her life. And for me, part of my commitment is to live and support others to live based on the lessons Audre Lorde learned at a very high cost, sometimes a brick wall is a brick wall. Message received. We are inventing ways to live otherwise.

There are still a few spots left in tomorrow’s webinar Audre Lorde and the Idea of the Community Accountable Intellectual/Artist you can sign up here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/audre-lorde-and-the-idea-of-the-community-accountable-intellectualartist-tickets-82879963201

And check out next month’s online weekend writing intensive My Words Will Be There: Audre Lorde, Black Feminism and Ancestral Listening. Info here: http://brillianceremastered.alexispauline.com/2019/11/22/my-words-will-be-there-audre-lorde-black-feminism-and-ancestral-listening/

(P.S. I’m happy to share that prints of “Message Received” my collage for Audre Lorde and my other ancestral collages are available for online purchase in multiple sizes. All proceeds go towards the ongoing work of Eternal Summer of the Black Feminist Mind.)

Black Feminist Breathing Collage 11x17

$45.00

Black Feminist Breathing Collage 22x28

$100.00

Yesterday was gender-transgressive poet preacher civil rights lawyer feminist educator and firebrand Pauli Murray’s 109th birthday and now in a time where as Pauli Murray once wrote in a letter to historian Patricia Bell-Scott “my lost causes are being found,” it is also Trans Day of Remembrance, a day where we remember the transcestors that have been taken from us unjustly and too soon, where we remember the total violence of a society that polices, enforces and produces gender as not a form of life, but a constriction on all of our breathing. I am returning to my collage “Heritage” for Pauli Murray today because while the many photographs that exist of Pauli Murray challenge the gender binary and as Pauli said in an interview recording recently shared at Think Tank meeting of artists imagining the Pauli Murray Center here in Durham “you can see I am very androgynous,” Pauli Murray’s resistance of gender norms in daily life and advocacy for themselves as one of the first people to ask medical professionals for hormone replacement therapy is often discarded as a disposable “detail” in a life characterized by easier to appropriate and more acceptable “accomplishments.” Although several brilliant Black trans and queer artists of color came together last year to celebrate the re-issue of Pauli Murray’s volume of poems Dark Testament (you can watch the whole event here) , and just yesterday in honor of Pauli Murray’s birthday genderqueer prophet, artist and preacher (and love of my life) Sangodare Akinwale launched a revolutionary sermonic residency that you can support with your attention and your coins here,

at this time Black trans and gender non-conforming people are not in a place of leadership around the circulation, amplification and application of Pauli Murray’s legacy. That’s what I’m remembering today.

In my collage for Pauli Murray I have placed on Pauli’s shoulder my own middle name “Pauline.” That version of my name is actually from the small name cards that I was given by my high school to use to invite people to my graduation. Pauline is my mother’s name and it was also the name of Pauli Murray’s Aunt Pauline who played a primary role in raising Pauli when Pauli’s mother died. Pauli, whose parents honored this aunt by naming Pauli “Anna Pauline Murray” had a special connection with this Aunt and actually sacrificed a life of greater flexibility and freedom in New York City to come back to North Carolina as a young adult to care for Aunt Pauline. I feel a kinship through the fact that in a way or for a time Pauli Murray and I shared the same middle name, a connection to the women that raised us. And I also placed our name “Pauline” on Pauli’s unsmiling shoulder where one might imagine the “chip” on a shoulder of a person navigating a burden and not pretending to enjoy it. Despite the fact that Pauli, like so many non-binary, trans and gender non-conforming people before and since, chose a fluid name “Pauli” and made that name official in practice and publication there was a way that the ancestral name “Pauline” both held and haunted Pauli’s life. The person Pauli needed to be in honor of the people who raised and cared for them as a child was in some senses a badge of honor and in other senses a heavy burden. The trap of gender itself was so harmful to Pauli during their lifetime that Pauli spent time in mental institutions, a particularly scary predicament given that Pauli’s father was beaten to death by a white guard at the “Hospital for the Negro Insane” in Maryland. And from inside the walls of the mental institution Pauli advocated specifically in well annotated and argued letters to their doctors that their gender had been mis-assigned and supported those letters with some of the most cutting edge medical research of the time, in the early 1930s. Assigned gender and the assigned gendered labor that also falls on people assigned female at birth was a part of Pauli’s heritage. A part of our shared heritage, in fact. Part of the ceremony of the collage “heritage” for me was to imagine Pauli, not only being held by and holding a gendered familial name, but also using the portal of that name as I now hold it to demand another future, a transformed legacy shouldered differently by those who stand on Pauli’s shoulders. More than anything this collage says to me “remember,” reassemble this field of grace that exceeds institutions, boxes, forms, that grows as wild as fierce as Pauli’s glare. Remember. A queerer obligation that grows out these shoulders like brown wings.

Black Feminist Breathing Collage 11x17

$45.00

I am happy to share that prints of my collage “Heritage” for Pauli Murray and 19 of my other ancestral collages are now available for online purchase in different sizes. All proceeds go to the continued work of Eternal Summer of the Black Feminist Mind.

Black Feminist Breathing Collage 22x28

$100.00

Last night about fifty freedom seekers gathered across space and time-zones to write ourselves more free. Inspired by the way Harriet Tubman trusted her dreams and freed herself and multitudes and drawing on the insights of the Combahee River Collective and the 2013 Combahee Pilgrimage to celebrate the 150th anniversary of Tubman’s successful Combahee River Uprising, we dedicated our participation, chanted collective freedom, wrote about our night dreams, our visionary intentions, the obstacles we face and the resources we can tap into. I dedicated my participation to the poet Ai Elo, now a young ancestor who joined us at the Combahee River and is still teaching me what it means to “live free or die.” The poetry, dreams, visions and insights folks shared last night were a priceless gift and an actualization of the freedom Harriet Tubman could already see and feel during her lifetime. I am offering an arrangement of the collective poem we created last night. I suggest reading it out loud and in good company. If you want to be notified of future classes, workshops and webinars you can join the list here. If you want to participate in our next webinar, on Audre Lorde and the Idea of the Community Accountable Intellectual/Artist next week, you can sign up here.

My People Are Free

By the Participants in “My People Are Free”: Harriet Tubman and Prophecy in the Present Tense

My people are sharing laughter

My people are loud and joyful

My people are dancing

My people are warriors

My people are magic

My people are gems

My people feel

My people are TRUTH

My people are listening

My people are at peace

My people are dripping amber honey and sharp flatware

My people are deliciously intentional

My people are inspiring

My people are inherently valuable

My people are liberated

My people are lofty lifting airborne

My people are together

My people are with us

My people are loving self, loving relationships and loving community

My people are spiraling upward and outward

My people are sky-wide

My people are shapeshifters

My people are jingle dancers

My people are fancy dancers

My people are THOUGHT

My people are brilliant

My people are radical visionaries

My people are dreamers

My people are strong

My people are brave

My people are beauty

My people are unimaginably wise

My people are vast and deep

My people are rooted

My people are growing

My people are FUTURE

My people are safe and daring

My people are strong and vulnerable

My people are resilient

My people are reframing

My people are beauty and gentleness

My people are smiling

My people are cared for

My people are healthy

My people are healing

My people are healed

My people are nourished and abundant

My people are infinite and resourceful

My people are limitless

My people are GOOD

My people are more than enough

My people are honey and light

My people are life giving

My people are everything

My people are embodiments

My people are beautifully ordinary

My people are gorgeous geniuses

My people are hilarious and endless

My people are the origins of everything and the inevitable future

My people are valuable beyond earthly measures

My people are deep in their bodies rooted to their ancestral intuition and creativity

My people are breathing deeply into the moment every moment, in every room

My people are immortal as long as we keep them with us remembering them

My people are a forever song

My people are reaching out across planes

My people are stars and the blackness between

My people are water

My people are clouds

My people are moons

My people are transforming

My people are reassured

My people are loved

My people are love

My people are joy

My people are home

My people are whole

My people are freedom incarnate

My people are infinite

My people are life

My people are my ancestors

My people are MY PEOPLE

My people are me

If you want to be notified of future classes, workshops and webinars you can join the list here. If you want to participate in our next webinar, on Audre Lorde and the Idea of the Community Accountable Intellectual/Artist next week, you can sign up here.

Tonight I am facilitating an online workshop called “My People Are Free”: Harriet Tubman and Prophecy in the Present Tense, and as I prepare our activities for tonight, I am revisiting my collage “Shapeshifter” for Harriet Tubman.

A photo inscribed with the words “Harriet Tubman, nurse, spy and scout” formed the basis for my collage “Shapeshifter” but the list could have been so much longer, and the words on that page seemed too small for the epic spirit of a tiny fugitive. What about general, healer, visionary? What about teacher, dreamer, aunt? What about sister, prophet, genius? In the collage near Harriet Tubman’s head you can see a scrap of Metis artist Christi Belacourt’s “GOOD LAND” a reframe of Canada mapped for indigenous reclamation as reprinted in Briarpatch magazine. Near her hand is a series of bowls to honor the necessary work Harriet Tubman did as an herbalist, healing people on their long journeys to freedom, but also preparing their spirits to relate to their bodies newly in a new context. Zachari Curtis gave a hands-on-workshop on the plant allies in the direct area of the Combahee River during Mobile Homecoming/Eternal Summer of the Black Feminist Mind’s Combahee Pilgrimage in 2013 to mark the 150th anniversary of Tubman’s Combahee River Uprising. Adaku Utah and Harriet’s Apothecary continue this sacred work of preparing our bodies and spirits to recognize and activate the presence of our freedom. Harriet Tubman did her work on behalf of multitudes of people, many of whom she would never meet, an infinitude of living beings beyond the human, and to do it, she activated her own multiplicity, not only through her many effective disguises, but also through the multiple skill-sets she gained from within her communities of origin and practice. For me, the collage “Shapeshifter” is a ceremony where the infinite possibility Harriet Tubman activated in practice, travels into our contemporary multitudes in the streets as Idle No More, Black Lives Matter and beyond, and the one at a time work of healing, feeding and nurturing each other’s bodies and spirits. Infinite love to Harriet Tubman who believed in our freedom more than she believed in the lie that stole us from ourselves, and acted accordingly.

P.S. By popular demand my collage “Shapeshifter” for Harriet Tubman and 19 of my other ancestral collages are available in 11x17 and 28x22 prints. All proceeds go towards the ongoing work of Eternal Summer of the Black Feminist Mind.

Black Feminist Breathing Collage 11x17

$45.00

Black Feminist Breathing Collage 22x28

$100.00