Last night’s solstice prep deep dive was a miracle. I am so grateful to everyone who participated in the quieter darker, less on camera way that felt so right for last night. We practiced silence. We investigated our rib cages. We pondered what are we doing to protect our hearts? What do we want to open our hearts up to in this new decade? What are the practices and beings that support our openness. It was a journey. Trust came up again and again and I am grateful for the folks who decided to trust ourselves and each other by participating in the space in whatever ways we did. I am grateful for your participation right now. Below is a poem we created of the affirmations that we want to ground and hold us as we navigate these darkest days. As usual, this poem is wonderful to read aloud. See if there is a particular line or set of lines that you want to meditate with this solstice.

Oh and our last writing intensive of the year “Cycles: The Unlearning Intensive” is next weekend. More info here: http://brillianceremastered.alexispauline.com/2019/12/16/cycles-the-unlearning-intensive/

Love,

Alexis

What. Me.

by the participants in Brilliance Remasterd’s Deep Dive Solstice Prep: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals

“deep in the ocean there is pressure. a lot of pressure. it will press on your chest and your lungs will collapse. you call it heartbreak. it is not. it is how what made you embraces you. reshapes you. welcomes you back. let it happen.”

-from Seven. Dive Deeper. (APG)

what breaks me births me

what collapses me expands me

what softens me keeps me fierce

who breathes with me loves me

what teaches me acknowledges me

what loves me strengthens me

what sees me knows me

what knows me builds me

what pleasures me nourishes me

what creates me enjoys me

what enjoys me will recall me

what moves me motivates me

what leaves me returns me

what abandons me frees me

what empties me opens me

what opens me strengthens me

what breaks my heart transforms me

what has been lost to me shapeshifts me

what dreams me confirms me

what calls me will keep calling me

what scares me stretches me

what stretches me opens me

what reminds me centers me

what comforts me holds me

what inspires me sustains me

what intrigues me humanizes me

what connects me teaches me

what hails me hushes me

what heals me loves me

what nourishes me finds me

what lulls me can wake me

what wakes me knows me better

what feeds me deepens me

what calls me deepens me

what i desire roots me

what grounds me fruits me 

what ruptures me transforms me

what abuses me shames me

what poisons me takes me

what poisons me exits me

what angers me motivates me

what oppresses me agitates me

what concerns me organizes me

what kills me reveres me

what judges me forgives me

what shames me falls before me

what broke me was not the end of me

the love of god made me

the love of god embraces me

what hears me answers me

what whispers to me ignites me

what challenges me sharpens me

what captures me lifts me

what breaks me perfects me

what speaks to me writes me

what me what me

what is me

what was me

what will be me

what feels me is me

what terrifies me is me

what destroys me rebirths me is me

Image from Whale and Dolphin Conservation

It’s the last solstice of the decade. Here in the northern hemisphere it’s a winter solstice full of dark days and urgent hungers. There are shallow ways to mark the passing of time, like lists on social media of best and worst ________ of the decade. And then there is the depth work we can’t avoid no matter how much we scroll, asking us what we want to take with us into a new decade and what we need to finally leave behind.

For me this has been a saltwater solstice, not because I am at the beach (I wish) but because it has been an immersion in familiar and new layers of grief, serious cravings for french fries and my mama’s macaroni and cheese and major decisions about my creative and community practices. So, of course, I turn to marine mammals, kindred experts in navigating salt, immersion and breath. Tomorrow night I will be facilitating an online writing solstice prep workshop called “Deep Dive” which will engage a seven step process inspired by mile deep diving whales for how we can go deep this solstice without getting lost, how we can get in and out of our own heads, how we can let our breathing reshape our lives and more. You can sign up for the workshop here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/deep-dive-solstice-prep-session-black-feminist-lessons-from-marine-mammals-tickets-86291166201

And some of the words that will be guiding us are below.

Deep love,

Alexis

Seven. A Guide for Diving Deeper.

(from Cachalot aka Phyester Macrocephalus aka the Sperm Whale who can dive more than a mile deep translated by APG)

one. breathe.

(we sperm whales can replace 90% of the air in our lungs with one breath. we can blow our breath 17 feet high. however deep you are breathing, breathe more, breathe deeper.)

two. take responsibility for your forehead.

(we, for example, have a head full of wax we can solidify like a weight to go deeper, we can melt it to become lighter than water and float. what is going on in your head? be intentional with it.)

three. hush.

(we stretch out our bodies 60 feet long at the surface and then arch our backs facing down, our tails come with us "barely creating a ripple." we are saving our energy for depth. this is not the time to splash.)

four. be flexible.

(deep in the ocean there is pressure. a lot of pressure. it will press on your chest and your lungs will collapse. you call it heartbreak. it is not. it is how what made you embraces you. reshapes you. welcomes you back. let it happen.)

five. be specific in your actions.

(when your lungs collapse you will need the oxygen in your blood. it is deep in your muscles. it was put there by practice. let your practice facilitate depth. it will be there when you need it.)

six. listen.

(we listen underneath our throats, not with our ears. we listen across the planet. we can hear each other click from opposite sides of the globe. though we may seem alone, we never are.)

seven. come back.

(you will know when it has been enough time in the deep. it can vary. attune to your need. account for your nourishment. direct your thoughts, melt them down make them light. and return.)[1

[1]

Image Credit: Whale and Dolphin Conservation
Direct quote from Smithsonian Handbook on Whales Dolphins and Porpoises

Black Feminist Breathing Collage 11x17

$45.00

Still from Pahokee

Audre Lorde had an eternal sense of her own being. When she was writing The Black Unicorn her first poetry book for a major press, she felt like she was in conversation with an “Ancestor Audre.” When she wrote Undersong a book of revisions of her earlier poems, she felt that she was being the teacher, older sister, mentor that her younger poet self would have always wanted, and when she spoke to Mari Evans in the interview that would become known as “My Words Will Be There,” she predicted that after she died, her words would continue to be part of the conversation, words that future Black women might agree with or disagree with, but whose presence would impact what they (as in we) did. Indeed, Audre Lorde’s work is prologue for so many of us, the ways we understand multiplicity and navigate institutions, the grace and complexity we offer to herself. I know for a fact that since I found Audre Lorde as a teenagers, my writing has always been in relation to hers. In fact, every essay I wrote for the rest of high school had an epigraph from one of her poems.

We certainly felt Audre Lorde’s presence during our intensive writing time together in the “My Words Will Be There” online intensive. We felt ourselves answering the call Audre Lorde made to fill what she saw as a vacuum around her, but she called across time to create the community she felt her work deserved and here we are. It was beautiful and poignant to notice that as we did our own healing, did the work of calling in what was missing in our own stories and journeys through this life, we were also in communion with Lorde. In a direct way, loving ourselves rigorously is fulfillment of and participation in the prophecies Audre Lorde made to save her own life, to speak her own truth, to source her own bravery, which is now collective in many forms. During the writing intensive we traveled backwards and forwards, speaking life to our younger selves and reaching beyond our lives to our relationships with what we hope will long outlive our breathing. Please take a deep breath and enjoy this poem that we created together, inspired by Audre Lorde’s “Prologue.”

P.S. If you want to sign up for our last writing intensive of the decade, “Cycles: The Unlearning Intensive” the information is here: http://brillianceremastered.alexispauline.com/2019/12/16/cycles-the-unlearning-intensive/

If you want to participate in this week’s Solstice Prep Deep Dive (Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals) sign up here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/deep-dive-solstice-prep-session-black-feminist-lessons-from-marine-mammals-tickets-86291166201

Past Noon

by the participants in the “My Words Will Be There” Intensive

“Somewhere in the landscape past noon/I shall leave a dark print/of the me that I am/and who I am not…

And the grasses will still be/Singing.”

-Audre Lorde “Prologue” (1971)

And the children will still be dancing.

And the spirit will still be shining.

And the oceans will still be undulating.

And the blue will still be deep.

And the guides will still be pleased.

And the air will still be laughing.

And the vibrations will still be accessible.

And the truth will still be here.

And the poems will still be sung.

And the image will still be changing.

And the analyses will still be valued.

And the children will still be growing.

And the babies will still be free.

And the dreams will still be manifesting.

And the love will still be here.

And the soup will still be on.

And the love will still be infinite.

And the listening will still be happening.

And the breathing will still be happening.

And the healing will still be happening.

And the laughter will still be present.

And the oracle will still be everywhere.

And the joy will still be profound.

And the kisses will still be fierce.

And the she wolf will still be howling.

And the sound will still be creation.

And the ancestors will still be delighted.

And the sky will still be sky.

And the joy will still be manifest.

And the flowers will still be blooming.

Black Feminist Breathing Collage 11x17

$45.00

“Act Like You Know” for Fannie Lou Hamer and Ella Baker

Today is Ella Baker’s birthday, and I wonder what they call her in the ancestral realm. Goddess of the Grassroots? Archangel of all Activists? More than anything I wonder, is Ella Baker at rest? My devotional collage “Act Like You Know” in honor of Fannie Lou Hamer and Ella Baker is based on one of my very favorite images of all time: documentary evidence of Ella Baker’s divine work on this planet and her partnership with Fannie Lou Hamer and many others to create the Freedom Democratic Party. The Freedom Democratic Party was a visionary intervention into electoral politics that didn’t wait for racism to no longer be a factor in national electoral politics (they would in that case, still be waiting now) but instead went ahead and created the multi-racial class equitable delegations that grassroots organizing could create and placed them alongside the segregated and rigged delegations that US electoral politics as usual generated. Simply put, what would an actual “democratic” party look like if the people were free and democracy wasn’t a code word for racial capitalism? Well, short answer? It would look nothing like the Democratic Party. This national work, with its epicenter in Mississippi was a performance of the possible, demonstrating the presence of another mode of governance right alongside the desperately dominating racist status quo (does that sound relevant to you today?) I think of this work as a precedent to the work Black women like Charlene Carruthers, Stacey Abrams and others are doing now to engage electoral politics with a revolutionary vision. And I also think of it as one of the most effective performance art projects in recorded history.

So in that case, my collage is meta-art, a work of art about a work of art, a still visual with a grand performance as it’s primary reference. But I’ll leave that for some wonderful emerging Black feminist art historian to explore in their thesis. What I really want to write about is rest. And I want to write about it because I want to learn how to do it. Ella Baker is well known for her words, popularized by the freedom singers Sweet Honey in the Rock, “We who believe in freedom cannot rest until it comes.” And I have written elsewhere about that time that Ella Baker’s community fundraised for her to take a sabbatical and she couldn’t find the time to take it. And it’s time for me to write about it again, because I can still relate. What would freedom feel like to me? Well, it would feel restful, abundant, balanced. I would feel in tune with the cosmic cycles, the ebb and flow, the hibernation that my mammal self craves right now instead of the pressure to fight the systemic oppression that don’t quit. But if freedom includes rest, and we who believe in freedom cannot rest until it comes, then does that mean we can’t be free until we are free which is not now?

I don’t propose that Ella Baker didn’t mean what she meant. What she meant was that the work of justice is urgent because people are dying in myriad ways because of systemic racism and the deaths of Black people are erased as if their lives were never sacred. And we are not going to accept that ever. Ella Baker’s standard for rest was not the ascendence of a charismatic Black leader, even a Black president, it was accountability instead of apathy for the racist production of Black death. To be specific, Ella Baker said

“Until the killing of black men, black mothers' sons, becomes as important to the rest of the country as the killing of a white mother's son, we who believe in freedom cannot rest until this happens.”

So rest, appears twice. Rest as in “the rest of the country” which is who? The people who don’t value Black life. And then who are “we”? The ones who cannot rest until the “rest of the country” values Black life? Those of us who already believe in freedom. So in the life of this sentence, “rest” first signifies division. The rest of the country, those who can sleep at night because they do not identify with Black life or identify Black lives as inherently valuable, sacred, worthy of existence, respect and protection. Rest, first signifies the false rest, unearned comfort of those who benefit from the systemic oppression of others. And the second reference to rest is actually a call for unrest or disruptive action on the part of we who are woke, because we believe in freedom. In other words, if Black mothers can’t sleep, white mother’s are about to get snatched out of their rest, because nobody in here is going to rest while I’m still stressed! Look at the angle of Ella Baker’s face, the tilt of her chin! She is not playing.

Ella Baker’s profound, brave and prophetic words are fueling direct action for Black Lives right now. As they should be. And I still want to talk about rest. How we move from the unjust rest of apathy to the resortative abundance of shared power, a life of action that knows deep peace, a progressive life where there is space for rest.

And even though Ella Baker could not see sabbatical in the urgency of that particular moment documented in her collection of letters at the Schomburg Center in Harlem (where she moved and lived at the YWCA after her North Carolina education), we know Ella Baker knew about rest. Because it was Ella Baker, as Barbara Ransby’s research and Baker’s own words teach us, who knew about stepping back. Who felt no need to do everything. Who in fact cultivated and demonstrated the political value of leadership from the most, from the mass, from the people and she knew how to trust that. Ella Baker’s life was a long beautiful song, and part of that may be because she led, not from her ego but by her faith in the multitude, the power of the people. Yes, though as many reading this know as well as I do, youth development work is some of the most rigorous presence-requiring work that exists, work that has certainly kept me up at all hours, the actual practice of developing leaders to replace us, which Ella Baker modeled in her mentorship of the leaders of SNCC, implies sharing power, an intergenerational invitation to allow our elders to rest in certain ways and grow in others.

I want rest in my life like the part of the song where we take a deep breath and remember how good it feels to be singing. I want rest in my life like a baby’s head on the chest of a parent as if I have no need yet for strong neck muscles, and can sleep anywhere. And my skull hasn’t fused so my mind is still open and downloading love direct from the source. Okay. There it is.

When I was adorning angel ancestor Ella Baker in the ceremony that has this collage as its only visual artifact, I was chanting her words “Give light and people will find the way.” Which are some of the most restful words I know. I was chanting those words in gratitude and and to reprogram my brain which had become cluttered with a lot of doubt and ego, a lot of worthless noise about how I personally had to make sure every good thing I wanted to exist in the world got done and how no one else could do it and how I had to personally supervise and things had to look how I would have imagined them and also I had to keep reminding everyone and also if i stepped back and things didn’t work out it would be my fault and most of all that I couldn’t trust the people because haven’t I been hurt and disappointed so many times by people I should be able to trust… In other words, my head was filled with the opposite of rest, not just that but ego-driven babble about the impossibility of rest.

But Ella Baker not only knew how to trust the people she also suggested it was possible to “give light.” What light? From where? Mmhmm. And that’s exactly what is at stake in my study of Ella Baker, marked visually here by her halo, her crown of bracelets with an open center, aligning her crown chakra with the dazzling O above, the referent circle beyond, the opening for light to come through. Trusting the people and trusting an infinite source beyond my lifetime and control is the same act of opening, it moves me beyond my ego. And so the way is opened, it is unlimited, and because it is unlimited I am free, and because I believe in freedom, which in practice, looks like believing in you, we are free. And if we are free than we can rest, not because it’s all over, but because we are all here, and because this life-force is ongoing and it’s so much bigger than our fears, it’s so old that it’s new.

There is love beaming, beaming into us always, if we can breathe deep enough to let it through. And what would we do, what we would act like, if we knew?

P.S. Prints of my collage for Ella Baker and Fannie Lou Hamer are now available online in different sizes, as are my other ancestral collages. All proceeds go to the continued work of the Eternal Summer of the Black Feminist Mind.

Black Feminist Breathing Collage 11x17

$45.00

Black Feminist Breathing Collage 22x28

$100.00

Today marks 50 years since the police murdered Fred Hampton, revolutionary, feeder of children, maker of chants, and one of my first examples of community accountable intellectual practice. Fred Hampton started his activism in high school in Chicago, and I first learned about him when I was in high school watching the Eyes on the Prize series. I heard him speak to the children in the Black Panthers Free Breakfast program and I will never forget the way he led the community in the chant "I'll live for the people, I'll work for the people, I'll die for the people, because I LOVE the people." Those words in that order in that cadence have remained with me as a mantra, as a standard, and as a decision-making touchstone. Because LOVE, as Fred Hampton taught the babies to say it, is the longest word, the one with the most breath and emphasis. The reason for everything else.

Last night a group of community accountable intellectuals, artists and community organizers gathered for this year’s Brilliance Remastered Q&A session and I laid out all my business, from nitty-gritty details about how I chose which graduate programs to yes and to say no to, the expansive role of mentorship in my life, the multiple experiments I did to learn what community support actually meant and to cultivate an honest relationship to my own “yes” and “no,” and more. In response to a wonderful question by a fellow Gemini about how I, as a person with my head in the stars, manages to have so much creative output, completion and productivity we spent a long time talking about the role of daily practice as what builds our lives. Inspired by our beloved Mobile Homecoming elder Ed Swan we created a group poem about what daily practice looks and feels like for us. As I typed up the poem this morning I thought about Chairman Fred, and what it means to practice freedom like breakfast, necessary, daily and never to be taken for granted. Gratitude eternal for the examples of Fred Hampton, Toni Cade Bambara, Lucille Clifton, Octavia Butler, Nayo Watkins, Nia Wilson, Zelda Lockhart, Asha Bandele and all the great teachers whose names I called during last night’s session.

I hope you enjoy our poem of practice. It’s best read aloud.

Love,

Lex

P.S. Here is the link for this weekend's writing intensive “My Words Will Be There: Audre Lorde, Black Feminist Time Travel and Ancestral Listening: http://brillianceremastered.alexispauline.com/2019/11/22/my-words-will-be-there-audre-lorde-black-feminism-and-ancestral-listening/

Here are my ancestral collages which are finally available as prints in a variety of sizes and which support the ongoing work of the Eternal Summer of the Black Feminist Mind:

Black Feminist Breathing Collage 11x17

$45.00

Black Feminist Breathing Collage 22x28

$100.00

And here is the link for the email list, if you want to be notified whenever we are doing something online or in person:  http://brillianceremastered.alexispauline.com/contact/

Freedom is a Practice

by the participants in the 2019 Brilliance Remastered Q&A Session

Everyday I am in ceremony.

Everyday I ask the universe for guidance.

Everyday I remember my dreams.

Everyday I light a candle.

Everyday I write the dreams down.

Everyday I connect to my source.

Everyday I have woken in the dark.

Everyday I meet the morning silence with my silence.

Everyday I go back to sleep while my partner drinks coffee.

Everyday I hydrate, water is life.

Everyday I value being alive.

Everyday I do gratitude.

Everyday I make offerings to the ancestors.

Everyday I listen.

Everyday I feel deep gratitude for my wondrous body.

Everyday I dance.

Everyday I write.

Everyday I kiss the babies.

Everyday I facetime the nibblings.

Everyday I say I love you to my partner, my children.

Everyday I share a smile with another black women, I see her.

Everyday I look in the mirror and tell myself I love you.

Everyday I put three layers of moisturizer on my face.

Everyday I rest well and deeply.

Everyday I worry less about the things I can’t do yet and try anyway.

Everyday I embrace my desires. 

Everyday I embrace the erotic, the passion, the juicy flow.

Everyday I live a story.

Everyday I poem (read one, write one, or dream one).

Everyday I journal, writing is life.

Everyday I trust the power of breath.

Everyday I try to feel good.

Everyday I acknowledge at least three things for which I am grateful.

Everyday I move the kundalini.

Everyday I laugh.

Everyday I exhale completely.

Everyday I move my body in the ways it needs to move.

Everyday I love myself fiercely.

blackfullness n  how Audre Lorde described her majority-Black community in St. Croix as in:

 “there is a large and everpresent Blackfullness to the days here that is very refreshing for me…”  -Audre Lorde “Above the Wind” 1990

Last night’s workshop Part & Parcel: Audre Lorde and the Idea of the Community Accountable Intellectual burst my heart. The tensions, longings and complexities in our relationships to the communities that claim us and/or that we want to claim are full of energy and insight. Together we bravely invoked communities we don’t know how to claim, used prepositions and pronouns to reflect on our relationships to multiple communities, for example here is my draft invocation of my communities of belonging/longing/origin/practice/accountability:

we the people of durham on top of black wealth and haunted by freedom

us black women of the world between pain and infinity

you the movements that shape me up under the concrete and my skin

us the diasporic west indians about this bright business of excellent longing

they the people with PhDs holding so many tremulous offerings

all a we the queer black troublemakers with magic hands and vulnerable hearts

you the gentrifiers with out home

me the ancestral multitude inside inspiration and urgency

me the mothering multitude in welcome and wonder and awe

me the waves of words coming with nerve and beauty and change and spit

AND THEN we sounded out where in our bodies we are holding knowing and fears about particular communities and reflected on how patterns we learned in our families of origins are impacting the ways we relate with larger communities now. Whew! That was a lot. I am grateful for the bravery and openness of all the participants. We went there!

And then finally, inspired by Audre Lorde’s poetic license, i.e. her invention of the word “blackfullness” to describe what she loved about her chosen community in St. Croix, where she went to save her life and transform her longing for Caribbean homeland into accountable action, and in the full knowledge that we have yet to invent the words for the relationships we desire most with the multiple communities that call us, we created a lexicon of words for what we want it to feel like. I was challenged this morning to make a poem with all of these words and here it is!

refresh

as in

the

overflowingfullness

of blackessence

where

choruschoir-osity

meets

talkability

our

amongstness

in deliciousifizing

nurtererances

the utterosity

of our

bigheartfull

furiousflowerings

into

vibration-magining

consensualizing

softiness

oh the

fambulosity

of our

cocoon-ealing

sustentrance

the openbreak

of our vulnerabattling

deartenderwarrioring

and all this

fawntastic

hugwarmy

affirmance

blove joy

siriusloy

a

horizoncommunionfothefuture

a

queerremakethismoment

for every incognegro

kairopractor

yes it’s a

gentlerizing

dancibration

full of

desireizing

bunnylove

yes.

 the moonstatic

rebellation

of our days.

Upcoming Brilliance Remastered Online Events

Ask Sista Docta Lex ANYTHING about the life you are building as a community accountable scholar/artist/writer/changemaker at Dec 3rd’s online Brilliance Remastered Q&A.

Sign up is open for next weekend's online intensive 'My Words Will Be There': Audre Lorde, Black Feminism and Ancestral Listening  (Dec 7&8)

And there is ONE more spot in this weekend's intensive on Grief, Memory and Ancestral Listening: http://brillianceremastered.alexispauline.com/2019/11/22/grief-and-memory-an-ancestral-listening-intensive/

And if you just generally want to be the first to know about all Brilliance Remastered online and in person workshops you can join the email list here: http://brillianceremastered.alexispauline.com/contact/

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