1. Vision and Purpose

Click here for a pdf of this activity created by Julia Wallace, Griffin HY and Alexis Pauline Gumbs:

View this document on Scribd

A visioning page for organizations, crews and projects.   Can your group answer these questions?
In 1977 the Combahee River Collective said “The most general statement of our politics at the present time would be that we are actively committed to struggling against racial, sexual, heterosexual and class oppression and see as our particular task the development of integrate systems of analysis and practice based upon the fact that the major systems of oppression are interlocking.”

How would you answer these questions about a project or group that you are involved in?

“The most general statement of our politics at the present time would be….”

_______________________________________________________

_______________________________________________________

“and (we) see as our particular task….”

_____________________________________________

____________________________________________________

For example:

Julia Wallace,  founding director of Queer Renaissance responds this way:

“The most general statement of our politics at the present time would be….

Queer Renaissance works to end poverty and oppression within the local communities it inhabits through alternative & cooperative economics; education; and multimedia & new media technology.

“and (we) see as our particular task….”

Queer Renaissance creates media and local social networks that galvanize a progressive community to create change. There are four divisions of QRR that work to this end – Media Arts & Entertainment, News & Education, Community & Event Promotion, and the Marketplace. QRR seeks to awaken an appreciation for arts & artists, activists & educators, entrepreneurs & revolutionaries, meaning & media-makers by supporting  existing and creating physical and virtual communities.

It’s really all in the name.

When I use the term Queer I am speaking not only of people who identify as Transgender, Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Gender Queer, Same or Both Gender Loving, MSM (Men who have Sex with Men), etc. but also to all people for whom the rigid binary gender and sexuality constructs are not life giving.

When I use the term Renaissance I am talking about a myriad of ways that I envision the reconnection of people to themselves and the gifts of life, love, and creation that are seemingly stripped at birth by cultural norms, gifts that I see being recovered. This return includes but is not limited to:

1. The revival of sexuality that is non-normative and/or fluid; revived for the full expression and exploration of a responsible and life giving boundless human sexuality.

2. The reawakening of the ability to and reality that people exist in all kinds of romantic and familial relationships from monogamous to polyamorous, from co-parenting to surrogate family creations, from single individuals to serial monogamists; and so on.

3. The resurrection of the fact that people are born with a range of genitalia, physiology, chromosomes, biology, spirits, body parts, and abilities. We want to affirm that all bodies are right, good, and normal. We want to assert that all bodies should be appreciated and allowed to participate and flourish in freedom love and live responsibly in the world.

Queer Renaissance seeks to recognize & revitalize these realities in our society, local communities, and artistic & cultural products through the creation and sharing of products, services, media and information.

To watch a video of Julia Wallace explaining the HotSpot technology that she is developing for Queer Renaissance see below!

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How would you describe the vision and purpose of your group!?

Send us your visions at brokenbeautifulpress@gmail.com, or leave a comment here!

2. Spy Poetry

finding the truth is a poetic act of faith

An old espionage trick was taking a message and hiding it in another message and using a special decoder to figure out the secret message. Cut out the shape below and place it on the paragraph above. We believe that finding the poetry, the queer push of words towards a vision of change hidden in the dominant narrative is a radical act.  Find the hidden line from the Combahee river collective.  (Or scroll down and cheat.)

Use this decoder (or create your own) to create your own secret message of hope and transformation. Where would you use spy poetry as a tool for social justice?

Remember how we used to ride bikes everywhere? I find myself reflecting on our youth these days.  Dreaming about the origins of that dinosaur game we used to play because in the way my memories replay in mind i think you weren’t really into historical stuff. That may not have been the reality. But i’ve been thinking of going back home to where those afro-american folks used to live across the street from us. Remember how they had women’s clubs meetings and they’d give us left over sandwiches? What continuous good times then. Who knew that life and death would come to mark our future so. We’ve seen a struggle or two right? For instance how we were worried about the survival of our garden that summer of the drought? And what about that harsh winter and our liberation that spring when the skies opened up.

(use your highlighter)

Remember how we used to ride bikes everywhere? I find myself reflecting on our youth these days.  Dreaming about the origins of that dinosaur game we used to play because in the way my memories replay in mind i think you weren’t really into historical stuff. That may not have been the reality. But i’ve been thinking of going back home to where those afro-american folks used to live across the street from us. Remember how they had women’s clubs meetings and they’d give us left over sandwiches? What continuous good times then. Who knew that life and death would come to mark our future so. We’ve seen a struggle or two right? For instance how we were worried about the survival of our garden that summer of the drought? And what about that harsh winter and our liberation that spring when the skies opened up.

highlight again below:

“We find

our origins

in the historical

reality

of Afro-American

women’s continuous

life-and-death

struggle

for survival

and liberation.”

Get the idea? Now make your own spy poetry!  Can you make a narrative the holds the words of the Combahee River Collective or some other words that you cherish deep on it’s inside?  Use it as an activity in your community, classroom or home…and let us know how it goes!

brokenbeautifulpress@gmail.com

3. Always

slips in meaning

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.

The word “always” can be used to create a history where there was nothing but disbelief. It can also be used to make it seem like something is natural, just because it happens to have been going on for a long time. The Combahee River Collective Statement uses the word “always” to establish a tradition of black feminism that predates the work of the women in the collective, AND some folks have found fault with these statements about what black women have “always” been doing, because it seems to suggest that there is some sort of natural standard for black women’s behavior.

How do you (want to) use the word “always” in your movement work?
Use the space below to make 5 sentences that use the word “always” (or don’t) to describe the tradition and vision of your work as honestly as you can. You may notice that the word “always” has different meaning every time.

see http://thatlittleblackbook.blogspot.com/2006/07/always-queerness-of-reproductive-frame.html

for more!

A Reflection from Noah Blose:

Pauli Murray is from Durham North Carolina

Michelle L. told me that Pauli Murray was trans.  S/he was a founder of
the National Organization for Women.  How do we know when to name/claim
our own, and why do we or don’t we do it?  How and why do we rewrite
histories to see ourselves there?

Download this activity as a (double-sided) worksheet here!

4. Contemporary Black Feminism

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

What does this look like?  Here’s what we think:

Here is an example from Lenelle Moise:

Here is a collage by Lex

Send us your visions and illustrations as .jpgs at brokenbeautifulpress@gmail.com.

5. Obscure

Who is (not) at the table?

“Both outside reactionary forces and racism and elitism within the movement itself have served to obscure our participation.”

The Combahee River Collective made space for black feminists to describe the ways their work in a larger movement was hidden and disrespected. What are some of the things that “obscure” (literally darken) or hide the labor of certain groups within our contemporary movements for social justice and transformation?

For example:

Sister Warrior Fabiola Sandoval who works with LA INCITE among other radical collaborations says:

Who is missing from many of the social justice organizing tables in the communities I belong in:
Older monolingual immigrant women, young mothers, young women of color from local high schools, and young children. For the most part it is those of us that are very well versed in social justice circles and predominantly college educated are the actively present attempting to make changes, dialogue, and in community heal when we do gather. Then, those of us that do what we do for the love of change and healing and are privileged to be equipped with the language navigating these communities pretty comfortably are doing so tired from over extending ourselves collaborating in many other projects. And I wonder and ask myself how can we bring light these obscure communities we don’t reach thriving from our own obscure exhaustion?

Silent collaborations:
At the SisterFire L.A. event Amaya and I sat in the crowd observing the artists at Mount St. Mary’s College, my alma mater. A Catholic women’s college that did not allow for queer groups to form and also didn’t dispense birth control information when I was student over five years ago. It was powerful and reaffirming to be among many queer women of color artists gulping the fierceness surrounding our sexuality and autonomy at my traditional alma mater, with Amaya by my side.   Filmmakers, poets, spoken word artists, comedians and singers beheld that tiny auditorium.

Around that corner is my day job and many immigrant women that live in the Figueroa Corridor community that could never even make the time to gather around the arts in the way I was.  Yet, in my bag were my own writings that are mostly for my own sanity and not to showcase to the world, not the face-to-face world at least.  The few writings that have had the privilege to be brought to life in writing.  Most words ferment getting stuck in my mind and tongue never making life because of insecurity, day-to-day full-time work, motherhood, and activism.

As I swallowed the energy around me, Amaya decided to take off her overall dress and remain with her undertights and blouse walking around even more confidently.  She brought smiles to many faces around us. Her fearlessness juxtaposed by my inhibitions with my own words was humbling. A couple women around me shared their admiration for Amaya’s “outrageous” prancing in undertights. The youngest person in that room did a grandiose thing, that only a couple of us captured. Unintentional inquisitiveness sparked a giggle, a lesson for me, and admiration. In this very safe and healing circle, beauty is embedded in each corner, child, and surrounding communities. We have to look with such keeness to capture these obscurities.

*****************************

Noemi Martinez founder of Hermana Resist offers the following guidelines for creating inclusive community:

Noemi Martinez is a writer, and organizer and a single mom.

How to Build a Community

that involves single parents, or steps to take so that I won’t be part of your community

first, what is your definition of a community?

• realize that parents are people. Realize that parents are people. Realize that parents are the same people you knew before.
• realize that parents can be activists, but they are also parents. They have different things on their mind. Single parents often have things such as food, rent, money, health on their mind. Unlike the single person, they are usually thinking of their child(ren) when they think about these things. Sometimes a single parent (take me for example) cannot concentrate on the latest protest, though important as it may be, because I may be thinking of what will my next job be, and the addition of subtraction of money in my head.
• to build a community, parents and children should be welcome and not feel they can’t attend a meeting/event because of their baby(ies).

• don’t roll your eyes when someone brings up childcare.
• realize the different situations of a single parent and a family that has 2 parents. If you don’t realize the difference, start asking questions.
• since when does your community involvement only concern the childless, or those that can leave their kids with someone else, the other parent, a spouse/ or friend. Yes, in theory, the children can be left with babysitters. Who need to be paid.
• ever think why parents stop being involved in community events and meetings?
• if single parents don’t feel you or the community cares about what it means to be a parent, a single parent, they won’t seek you out for help. This is not community. This is not a welcomed community.
• parenting and being a role model to kids in your community is important because they will be the activists of tomorrow.
• ask yourself why access to cultural events, planning and meetings for single parents is not important enough for you to have thought of before.
• why is motherhood and heavens forbid, single parenthood a step back in the eyes of activists and feminists? If the choice to terminate a pregnancy is radical, why isn’t the choice in being a mother radical?
• why don’t single parents attend your conferences, trainings, meetings, skill shares? Do you care that single parents don’t attend your events? Are you really thankful that snotty, bratty kids are not around to ruin your Utopian experience?
• don’t you want the next generation to care about the same things you care about? When will this happen?
• radical SINGLE parenting, heck, single parenting is so so fucking DIFFERENT than a family with 2 parents. SO SO DIFFERENT.
  
• racism almost always comes into play for single mothers of color.
  
• what new skills and influences will single parents give their children if the community doesn’t think it’s important for them to be involved? Luckily for me, I am awesome in all respects and will/am teaching my kids all about alternative media; non gendered play; violence in cartoons; baking vegan goodies; single mom awesomeness who uses a hammer are always the hero; that we will survive; writing; sewing; crafts… and so forth.

These questions and concerns, I believe, will never be resolved. But these are some of the reasons the single parents in your communities might not be receptive to your call for actions. Retreat, re-access, prioritize is the common measures taken by single parents when they see the resistance to others caring about their concerns.
Noemi Martinez
http://www.hermanaresist.com

Stacey Milbern is a poet and a disability rights organizer.

Stacey Milbern responded to this prompt with an open letter:

Hey sister,

Thank you for your letter. I am in constant amazement of how every word that drips from your pen is poetically prophetic and so real to your experience… but you already knew I was a fangirl, right? : )

Dancing is a central part of how you see the world and interact with your body. Since I didn’t think I interacted with my body in the way that you do with yours, I was really curious to how movement/dance related to your experience as a disabled queer woman of color, let alone all the other stories, identities, communities that shape you…like how did you take something we are told everyday is ugly and shameful and reclaim it as yours, let alone get in a place where you can be so unabashedly beautiful?

It has been quite an experience to learn to love my body in a way that’s not just political, but on the personal level, too. It’s so hard talking about this because I feel like mainstream media has branded any kind of conversation like this to be about white teenage girls’ self-esteem…it sucks out experiences of colonization and oppression, it turns conversations about community liberation into ones about just liking yourself, and completely ignores their [dominant culture media] role in all this. Talking about bodies also makes me angry, because like you said, there are whole disciplines, campaigns and movements that are supposed to be about us but then completely miss how our bodies are central to our experiences. If they only knew how much my body plays a role in the way I navigate the world, in my activism, in my love…but maybe they never can? The fact that they can even overlook or completely miss something so powerful as the body is evidence of how our movements and our studies mirror mainstream society and not the experiences of people living on/at the intersections of complex identities and experiences with various overlapping, intersecting –isms?

Part of me is glad though. Maybe this is meant for only us to know. Maybe this is too powerful for them. Maybe it would lose its value if everyone knew it, if dominant culture or assimilationist social movements had the opportunity to co-opt and appropriate it. Right now the way we interact with our bodies is a secret to be shared in letters, between the flexes of arms, legs, and spins in your dances, and in deep connection to the foremothers. What do you think?

Anyways. I love you so much. So thankful to be connected to you.

With you always.

Stacey Milbern

So how do we make sure our events, meetings, gatherings are accessible to everyone we are accountable to?  Click here to see an ongoing list of strategies for accessibility.

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What about you? Who is missing from the table you are dismantling?

What are some of the forces within and outside of our movements that make this happen?

6. Craziness, Conscious, Concepts: Sexual Politics and Feminism

“Black feminists often talk about their feelings of craziness before becoming conscious of the concepts of sexual politics, patriarchal rule and most importantly, feminism, the political analysis and practice that we women use to struggle against our oppression.”

From http://www.iwannalive.wordpress.com

What do we think about these concepts of craziness and consciousness in our movements?  Do we move from craziness to consciousness?  Does our consciousness lead us to to new levels of crazy? Is the point of our organizing to feel un-crazy?  Who says what crazy means anyway?  How did you feel before gaining some of the tools and words that we use as organizers?  How do you feel inside your movement(s)?  What are some of the political analyses and practices that you use to struggle against oppression and create clarity in your organizing?

Check out I Wanna Live the radical self-care site created by women of color in Washington DC (including the brilliant Kismet who commented below)!  I wanna live features visual meditations on what self-care means for women of color, sparked by a redefined relationship to anger members of INCITE: Women of Color Against Violence in DC created during the Summer of Our Lorde.   Reflect on the image above in honor of the young, gifted, queer and black Lorraine Hansberry.

Add your comment here or send us a response at brokenbeautifulpress@gmail.com

7. Drawn Together

“A combined anti-racist and anti-sexist position drew us together initially, and as we developed politically we addressed ourselves to heterosexism and economic oppression under capitalism.”

What draws your group together? OR What draws you to to the people you organize with?
What are some of the main issues and audiences you address yourselves to?  Use the space below to start a love letter to the movement or movements you are committed to building.  Be sure to let us know who your letter is addressed to!!!

For example queer black New Jersey based scholar, educator and community organizer Darnell Moore says:

to my beloved community of radical radicals: [those who have been colored by race, kept bound by sex/gender normativity, trapped in systems of economic inequality, rendered alien]:

i scribble my judgments/my feelings/my love/my rage/my life: on paper.

i locate my “self” in the dis-located spaces that seek to confine me: on paper

i refuse to be bound, i’m a refugee on a journey constantly scuffling with violent metonyms (it’s hard being a “faggot”) and authoritarian ideals: on paper

if i don’t, then those behind me won’t feel the residual heat of my incensed voice: on paper.

so i write.

i write to produce a perpetual fire that will set ablaze new understandings.

my desire: to watch racist/sexist/classist/ethno-centrist/neo-imperialist/capitalist ideologies and apparatuses go up in flames as if they were hit by a smart bomb, a moronic product of the military state’s own design

i write words that are arbiters and catalysts; they are birthed to produce action, resistance and confrontation.

they are attentively designed to raze structures of power that consign hes, shes, hirs and zhes to marginalized interstices.

so, i write

to demolish inequities and disharmony.

i write to hearten and galvanize a community on the verge of revolution.

i chose not to write for you as if I have perfected the art of masculinist story telling (and I don’t want to), so i write in solidarity with you.

yet, i chose to not only write with you, but also:

to stand beside you…

to be your co-conspirator in the struggle for justice…

to carry you when your have been weakened by rhetoric, invectives and state-sanctioned regulations…

and if your blood is spilled by war/abuse,

body destroyed by poverty/neglect

or if your voice is silent because of fear/laws then i will write ever the more.

i will stand until my black knees begin to weaken,

fight injustice, beside you, until humanity’s sin is banished to the background of a new global agenda

and i will be: existing in unity so that we may disrupt “power.”

darnell l. moore

Post your letters as comments here or send them to us at brokenbeautifulpress@gmail.com!

8. Sprung!

by Jerry Currier

“Above all else, our politics initially sprang from the shared belief that Black women are inherently valuable, that our liberation is a necessity not as an adjunct to somebody else’s but because of our need as human persons for autonomy.”
Complete the poem:

above

sprang             shared

liberation

need

Post your poems below or email us at brokenbeautifulpress@gmail.com

For example:   Alexis Charles who says she usually does NOT write poetry contributed this beautiful elaboration:

1. Not from ABOVE

But from within.

You gave life to words.

That gave me life.

Words that

SPRANG  from our  SHARED oppressions, fears, dreams and joys.

Calling for our LIBERATION.

Illuminating our NEED.

2. When I had lost faith in everything ABOVE.
What SPRANG from the depths of your hearts.
Let me know my pain was SHARED.
The not so quiet call for LIBERATION
Those words
“black women are inherently valuable”
Held me softly, tenderly, gently,
Quieted the dull aching NEED
Wrapped me in love and solidarity

3.

we
ABOVE
Where do   exist?
below
I
Your words

S
P
R
A
iNto motion a well-spring of truth, knowledge and love gushing from the valleys of your thoughts,
G through the canyons of your silences, over the cliffs of your screams.

I SHARED my fears and dreams with you and I realized I’m not the only one

MyLIfeisnotanisolatedabBERATION

In moments of NEED you
answer.’

Cynthia bringing the light!

Cynthia Oka, radical mama and feminist indigenous rights organizer in Vancouver wrote:

5:47 am

pungent is the aching flesh over hard bone

it is no luxury to choose

liberation

rising dawn

droplets of sun on my skin

stinging like ice

i must search again

build dig   tear from towers of tyranny

hope

all that demands our breaking

a million footsteps marching on my chest

fear not fear not

the arms of my mothers

spears sprang against cannons

today so too do mine

that is my blood spilled shared

that is my life-giving love

that is my claim

on freedom

above this colonial landscape

i embalm my body

and choose to grace this day

with my presence

i am no finely cut diamond

i am the raw earth

on which your build your throne

i desire no queenhood

i am higher than price

stars breaking in sky

this is my spirit

cage me wage me

snap every joint

i rewrite the universe

through my undoing

we are our prophets

persistent as dew

fear not fear not

we are all we need

9. The Only Ones

“We realize that the only people who care enough about us to work consistently for our liberation are us.  Our politics evolve from a healthy love for ourselves, our sisters and our community which allows us to continue our struggle and work.”

Write a poem for someone you love using at least 4 of the words in the above passage.

Post your poems as comments below or email us at brokenbeautifulpress@gmail.com!

For example radical anti-racist educator Tema Okun wrote the following poem for her students:

Tema Okun

Combahee Love

We realize

that in America

the right to be uninformed

is holy ground.

This is a love letter to us, then,

the only people who struggle consistently

to be so careless with our love.

I am witness to how we revel in our lousy politics.

I wish for us instead

a healthy love,

one to usher in our liberation

from ourselves and

into community, into enough.

-Tema Okun November 2008

Aiden Riley Graham

And radical archivist and trans-activist Aiden Riley Graham wrote this amazing poem for his comrade Noah Blose:

Why we’re so important to me…

When I feel unseen by the rest of the world, you see me

A mirror to find myself in

Walks toward liberation found in our talks

Simple-complex conversations

Grounding me in love and compassion,

Shaking me from everyday painful reactions

Learning to love myself, through loving you

Replacing individual failed expectations

With dreams of collective possibility,

Painful shared rememberings

Bring our communal struggle into relief

Standing “Eye to Eye” in the spirit of Audre

We’re everything we need to be

The only ones

And only one of many

A transformative justice we forge

Daily, weekly, monthly

They’re just phone conversations

And oh so much more

– Aiden Graham to Noah Blose

10. Simultaneous Switch

“We also often find it difficult to separate race from class from sex oppression because in our lives they are most often experienced simultaneously.”

Switch around and change the words in this sentence to describe your experience.

For example SONG co-director Caitlin Breedlove made the following sentences:

Caitlin breaking it down...

“We always find it hard to separate race from class from sex oppression from ethnicity from desire from longing from love because in our lives they are experienced simultaneously.”

‘We cannot separate our race from class from sex oppression from ethnicity from desire from longing from exile from love because they are experienced simultaneously.”

“We are every single one of our ancestors; that is why we cannot separate race from class from sex oppression from ethnicity (the painted bracelets of my grandmothers) from desire (my 15-year old hands on the back of her neck), from longing from exile (talking to myself in my peoples language alone in the car) from love because they are experienced simultaneously.”

Leave a comment below or email brokenbeautifulpress@gmail.com!

11. Struggling With…

“We struggle together with Black men against racism, while we also struggle with Black men about sexism.”

There’s a long history of black women bringing up the gender question and it being ignored or even dismissed by black men. How do we move this conversation forward? Some of us are writing love letters to misogynists and patriarchs within our communities. We are writing letters to black men that not only tell them about themselves but also offer resources to expand their thinking on the issues we deem important. (email firewalkingwarriors@gmail.com for more info!)

What men in your world do you know in your community who could benefit from some feminist intervention?

What about their behavior needs to be challenged?

How could you and like minded individuals approach them to make that happen?

Would you write a letter? Have a meeting?

For example:

This letter was written by Nia Mclean in response to a Hip Hop song called “Hot N Tot” by Sir Will. To listen to the song and watch the performance, click here: “Hot N Tot”

The Saartjie Project is an artist collective that is exploring the fascination with the black female form.
Open Letter to Sir Will and the producers of “Hot N Tot”

Dear Sir Will,

Your MySpace page has a banner that says “Stop Whack Hip Hop”. As a lover of hip hop I totally agree with you. I often question “why is Hip Hop in such a dismal state?” At any given time I can’t listen to the radio for 15 minutes without feeling like I’m nothing more than my sex and more specifically how good I am at it. Misogyny and objectification of women – particularly black women, has run amuck within the culture that you and I care about.

Your MySpace page initially caught my attention because of your song “Hot N Tot”. Sir Will there is a LOT of painful history behind that term, much like the word Nigger. I am hoping that you and your producers are just ignorant about its history and not just ignoring it.  I am a part of The Saartjie Project, an artist collective that is exploring the fascination with the black female form and bringing dignity and light to the legacy of Saartjie (Sarah) Baartman, more popularly known as the Hottentot Venus, the same term you reference in your song.

In the early 1800’s as a young South African woman, Saartjie Baartman was paraded around Europe like a freak of nature by a white man, Dunlap to show off her “Hottentot“, her “Jungle Booty” as you put it in your song. People were so fascinated with her behind that they paid money, not just to stare and gawk, but also poke and prod w/their hands, umbrellas, or whatever they had available. Upon her death, her “Hottentot” was dissected in public, put in a jar of formaldehyde and displayed in the Musee de Paris, as if it were a medical oddity – up until the 1970’s! All because she was seen as erotic and exotic, which denied her (in the eyes of those who exploited her) the ability to be anything else (ex. Smart, loving, maternal, strong).

Sir Will, please don’t dismiss this letter by thinking that Saartjie’s story is one in a million. Her tragic legacy is alive. Today, almost 200 years later we are still being exploited and reduced to nothing more than body parts. You and I both know this. We also know that much of hip hop profits from expressing tired myths about black male and female sexuality.

Know that I write out of frustration, but also out of love. Love for myself, Saartjie, all the sisters I am writing on behalf of and for artists like you.  Sir Will you clearly have talent; yet you are taking the easy way out by rhyming sexist lyrics over catchy beats.  There is a consequence to this. The demand to demonize the black female body is what gave Saartjie her unfortunate career and it killed her. The next time you perform “Hot N Tot” think about Saartjie Baartman. Learn more about the woman your song is named after. Consider the “video vixens”- the ladies dancing on your YouTube video – who are presumed to the interchangeable with cars and other material trappings of success. Who can say for sure why these women have chosen such a station? Perhaps to validate their beauty and the prospect of living the “good life”? Consider the young black girls who misguidedly look to these vixens for cues on who to dress, act, and present themselves in the world. Saartjie was also mislead, she began her journey believing that it would bring her a better life, not lead to her private parts swimming around in a jar of formaldehyde.

My point is, there has to be more. You can do better. Instead of condemning you, I am challenging you to do just that. I challenge you to make good music that responsibly speaks of women, glorifying the whole being, not just parts of her.

So if you really care about hip hop (and I hope, Black women) dare to be different. Dare to break out of the cookie-cutter mold of entertaining at the sake of your sisters, your mother or your partner.

Words are so powerful. Use yours wisely.

Thank you for reading, Sir Will. The Saartjie Project would love to hear your thoughts.

Nia Mclean

The Saartjie Project

www.thesaartjieproject.org

Use this space to answer these questions and devise a plan to approach them and a time line for action. Let us know how it goes!

Comment here or email us at firewalkingwarriors@gmail.com!

12. Testify

“Even our Black women’s style of talking/testifying in Black language about what we have experienced has a resonance that is both cultural and political.”

Is there such a thing as Black language? Or Black women’s style? Maybe there are many non-normative language practices and many manifestations of black femininity. In this passage, the authors of the Combahee River Collective Statement draw on a tradition of “testifying” most commonly remembered as statements of faith spoken by members of black churches, and black southern churches in particular. We say that testifying can also be used outside of churches when people express the profound and sometimes difficult truths of their own experiences. We have seen breakthroughs in analysis, relationships and action when people speak deeply about where their faith in movement and their energy for organizing comes from.

What are 3 things you can testify to as important experiences that have built your faith in the world you want to create?
Check out the piece from Ashon below:

Ashon Crawley

Leave your 3 testimonies as comments here or email us at brokenbeautifulpress@gmail.com!

13. Multi-Layered Texture: An Illustration

“No one before has ever examined the multilayered texture of Black women’s lives.”

What does this look like?  Send a drawing, collage or image in .jpg form to brokenbeautifulpress@gmail.com and we’ll post it!

Fallon Wilson co-founder of the Cyberquilting Experiment

offers these drawings from her Jezebel Plant Goddess Series:

14. Smart ugly?

\”We discovered that all of us, because we were \”smart\” had also been considered \”ugly,\” i.e. \”smart-ugly.\” \”Smart-ugly\” crytallized the way in which most of us had been forced to develop out intellects at great cost to our \”social\” lives. The sanctions in the Black and white communities against Black women thinkers is comparatively much higher than for white women, particularly ones from the educated middle and upper classes.\”

Hmmm.  What do we think? What are the economies of beauty, privilege and intelligence at work in our communities and movements?

Radical educator artist and writer Kameelah Rasheed says

Artist, Writer and Educator Kameelah Rasheed

we are the \’kinda cute nerdy black girls in glasses with the big asses.\’  we sneak to read pages of academic books hidden in fashion magazine covers and we sway in our silk stockings with golden seams as does nina simone\’s see-line woman.  we smile reluctantly while questioning the politics of gendered vulnerability.  we intimately know how we are treated when we are cute and quiet and we know that within a split second we can become ugly and undesirable if we use a polysyllable word or concession clause.  we know our partners would prefer us more soft spoken.  we know that the day we chose books over lipstick and wrote manifestas on any open space that we found that were choosing a lonely path.  it was/is lonely because we never knew where the \’weird\’ black girls hide out.  they are are scattered throughout the diaspora, tucked in corners where mail and internet cannot reach.  they wander if we exist too.

knowing this

we learned to shuck n\’ jive, veiling our opposition under layers of ambiguous sentences, demure smiles, and pants just tight enough to hint at a desireable feminity because we still yearned be seen beyond the duality of smart-ugly.  we pretended to not know the importance of the sepoy mutiny in india\’s colonial history, hesitated to explain the nuances of electron configuration, and feigned ignorance when asked about the pivotal moments in south africa\’s liberation movement.  we let him talk even as our faces are flushed with anger because we do not want to seem \’too aggressive.\’  we go to sephora when we really want to hit up that used book store down the street.  when we get home we eagerly plunge into books and other texts trying to reconnect with the parts of souls we abandoned for some semblance of belonging.  we attempt to exorcise our collective demons by seeking desperate refuge in paul beatty\’s \’neighborhood safe houses on the ghetto geeks\’ underground railroad\’ only to realize such sanctuary leads to more pain when we are called up for yet another performance.  we learn the grammar of smart-ugly politics at 8 years old.  we don\’t write down rules, rather these rules are written on our bodies and in the faces of folks who give askew glances when we walk out the mall with books instead of dresses.  we perform our blackness, our womanhood, our existence because to be smart-ugly is like permanent exile.  never fully accepted in the communities of other women and far too \’smart\’ to be authentically black, we are forced into limbo.  but limbo is the space of opportunity and dare i saw privilege.  to be in limbo is resist the satanic incantation that our female bodies cannot carry intellect as heavy as our thighs and as broad as our hips. ida b. wells gave a damn if they called her ugly because she had more important things to do.

and as queengodis wrote in 1991,

and while he was busy detesting yo\’ mama
for being so \’damn ugly\’–
she was busy building the underground railroad…

to be smart-ugly is to be a unspoken threat.

we are the beautiful black women whose light they fear.  instead of fanning our flames, they sought to extinguish our fire by calling us ugly so that we\’d be distract from the duties our ancestors and creator laid at our feet.  they sought to turn our attention away from survival and collective healing.  they saw beauty in us before we saw it in ourselves but named it ugliness in hopes that we\’d never reunite with this sacred knowing.  \’ugly\’ is the cry of the fearful who pray that we never recognize ourselves.

Join an ongoing discussion of this topic on http://www.quirkyblackgirls.ning.com

leave your comments here and or email us at brokenbeautifulpress@gmail.com!

15. Masculinities

“We have a great deal of criticism and loathing for what men have been socialized to be in this society: what they support, how thy act, and how they oppress.  But we do not have the misguided notion that it is their maleness, per se -i.e., their biological maleness-that makes them what they are.  As Black women we find any type of biological determinism a particularly dangerous and reactionary basis upon which to build a politic.”

People sometimes think that gender is biologically based. that being a “man” in the way that society values a particular kind of masculinity is rooted in DNA, programed into our very beings as humans. The collective isn’t so sure. If you look around the world and the country you’ll see all different ways that masculinity is performed, not just by men but by so called biological women as well.

What does your culture or community mark as masculinity?

What do you think about the markers? Are they only for men? Are they useful characteristics for men to possess?

How would you want masculinity to look?

Is this different from what femininity should look like?

why?

What do we actually have to do if we say that biological maleness and masculinity are not the same thing?

What new models of masculinity do queer and trans masculinities open up?

C. Riley Snorton is a radical intellectual

C. Riley Snorton, a scholar, activist and filmmaker who engages queer masculinities in his work provides the following thoughts:
Masculinity is always an unstable term–its relational nature suggests that it shifts and moves differently across communities and cultures.   Its instability also relates to the ways in which various cultures and communities seek to produce, maintain, and police masculinities even as any definition of the term dissolves under closer scrutiny.  For example, in many societies, there is a collapse in distinctions between “male,” “man,” and “masculine.”  These collapsed designations play out in encounters with medical personnel or in one’s local barbershop.  Similarly, societies organized under heteropatriarchy are interested in proscribing and circumscribing articulations of femininity—that is to say that controlling women becomes part of the project of stabilizing masculinity.  Hence it is often important to refuse conversations that assume (without problematizing or critique) the need to rescue the always-already black man in crisis.  These types of conversations do in fact draw on both a politics of respectability and forms of racialized nationalisms that seek to regulate and control (often through disavowal) gender multiplicity, femininity, and gender non-conformity.  Queer and trans masculinities do not presume a feminist politic, but are surveilled and subject to similar regimes of power that seek to constrain women’s lives.

What do you think?  Leave a comment or email us at brokenbeautifulpress@gmail.com

16. Victory and Failure

“During our years together as a Black feminist collective we have experienced success and defeat, joy and pain, victory and failure.”

What are some of the contrasting experiences that you have had with the folks you are organizing with right now and the past? What have you learned individually and collectively from those experiences?

Leave a comment here or email us at brokenbeautifulpress@gmail.com

17. Being Difficult: Questions

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

What desire, anxiety, hope and love do you feel towards fellow members of your oppressed group?

What’s a time when you could not speak your political stance out loud? What caused that? What would it take to make your vision more speakable?

Send us your reflections about these questions at brokenbeautifulpress@gmail.com or leave a comment here!

18. MORE DIFFICULTY

“The major source of difficulty in our political work is that we are not just trying to fight oppression on one front or even two, but instead to address a whole range of oppressions. We do not have racial, sexual, heterosexual or class privilege to rely upon, nor do we have even the minimal access to resources and power that groups who possess any one of these types of privilege have.”

One of the biggest ways that the Combahee River Collective has impacted the world is the development of what some call an “intersectional” political practice. This is a belief that all forms of oppression are linked and that in order to rebuild the world in the image of our own miraculousness we need to work together to work at the place where different oppressions meet.

The “major source of difficulty” that the collective members point out remains today. Those of us working to transform the world often lack many privileges and don’t have access to power because of who we are and the work that we do. And, even within our movement we have different levels of privilege of power.

Use the space below to imagine some ways that we can use our privileges creatively? (from driving a car, access to education, technological skills, connections to people with wealth, to citizenship, race, class and gendered privilege) What are ways that we can build power without access to the rewards of the society we are intending to replace with our radical vision?

Alba Onfrio is a Queer Radical Southern Missionary

For example Alba Onfrio of Southerners on New Ground says,

Use the space below to imagine some ways that we can use our privileges creatively? (from driving a car, access to education, technological skills, connections to people with wealth, to citizenship, race, class and gendered privilege) What are ways that we can build power without access to the rewards of the society we are intending to replace with our radical vision?

Sitting at the feet of an amazing elder, Pat Hussain, she once told me that the thing about privilege is that “you can either spend it or you can waste it, but ya’ can’t give it away.”

Growing up with a coal miner’s daughter, I learned real fast that you use what you got, that’s how you get what you need to get by, and as the youngest of eight, growing up as a sickly child in an Appalachian family, what she had was manipulation, and she taught me it well. In those sweet, Southern arms she had the power to control life and death. Protocol and gentility never wavered in our home, and it is there that I learned that the power to inflict the most pain did not, in fact, lie with the one who has the biggest stick, but with she who truly knows your soul and can crush your spirit with a word.  Let them do for you and pay for you and carry the heavy stuff and call you darlin’, not because you can’t carry the load yourself(that’s beside the point) or because you like it(even if you do), you let them do it because it makes them feel important and needed, but you’d better be paying close attention because if you ever have to do for yourself(which you will), you damn well better know how to do it without asking for help. That’s where the power lies—in your survival, and that’s what they can never know… until it’s too late. The secret truth that we are all we need, and we can make it.

Now I’m a thrifty shopper, but I like to spend my privilege strategically, subversively, and when it’s done to perfection, well, my, it is delicious! I don’t know if she knew it or not, I think maybe she did, but as they were correcting the “fer” in my accented speech, and making me set that 10-piece place setting for dinner, and that tea party for my tenth birthday, and read Miss Manners with my feet crossed at the ankles… those were all the lessons I could never learn in school. Did she really want me to aspire to that? or did she know that the propriety I learned would inevitably mix with the mental agility and femininity I was honing? Those grammar rules and that proper English… I use them to teach our beautiful, struggling “illegals” how to use those words to survive, and those dresses and stockings and heels… I wear them proudly as I get on my knees to give my lovers pleasure, to enjoy my own lust as it runs down my thigh to greet them. And those manners for that fancy dinner party? Why, yes, thank you for asking, I use those too and that $120K piece of paper from Duke; I use them to infiltrate space they would never let us in if they knew who I really was, and while I sip that expensive wine; I listen; I study; I learn, and as I thank them for the wonderful evening, I strategize how best to use it in their demise. The revolution is not coming, my dear, it is here, and while I fight for its swift collapse, I have to disclose that this system of oppression does well by me, in so many ways, and then I remember that even though the promised land is intimidating because I can’t always see it, these moments I feel so connected to you make me willing to spend every ounce I’ve got for the chance of getting us to freedom.  And as I’m sitting in that pew, calling on those verses I learned so long ago and asking God for the faculty and opportunity to convince them of our worthiness to exist, as queers, as women, as people of color, as refugees, I am also asking for strength to keep spending this privilege and thanking God every day for letting me find you along the way.

-Alba Onofrio, January 16, 2009

19. Dis/possession

“We are dispossessed psychologically and on every other level, and yet we feel the necessity to struggle to change the condition of all Black women.”

What does this look like?  Make a drawing, collage, painting, quilt, flyer etc.

and send it to us at brokenbeautifulpress@gmail.com

20. My Leap Into Revolutionary Action

“We might use our position at the bottom, however, to make a clear leap into revolutionary action.”

Imaginatively describe your “clear (or not so clear) leap into revolutionary action” in the style of the “What I Did on My Summer Vacation” essay (but better!)

Where are you leaping from? how does the leap feel? what do you smell along the way?

Send us your “My Leap Into Revolutionary Action” reflections at brokenbeautifulpress@gmail.com!

For example poet/artist educator Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha wrote the following!

fresh
The thing about a leap into revolutionary consciousness: it feels good. It feels so, so good.

I’ve been thinking about this lately as I am 33/ Bay Area/ life of my dreams/ working, working working/ friends, fam, love/ grad school, four jobs, writing, performance, career/ and one of those is one of those Bay Area nonprofit jobs you may have heard of. That people whisper, bitch, moan and complain about. That sounds good on paper, so much so that if you love somewhere else you are like “what the fuck are my Bay Area friends complaining about”. Until you experience it. You get one of those jobs that looks so good on paper, where you are gonna be loved and hired cause of your passion, your brown queer girl or boy genius, your smarts and fashion and drive and deep grounded grassroots intellectual knowledge and all the people you know and all the brilliant ideas you are gonna come up with. And instead it is one of those places that feels like a migraine headache, like someone is squeezing your brain with both hands, like you don’t have business casual business casual enough, like it so dry, like your brain just wanders. Like the words, they look alright on the page (sometimes) but how you got there, how you were used and how it felt when you were-

that

don’t.

And it don’t matter how many fancy brunches they take you too on their dime, it don’t take away from the fact that you need the $500 a month but you ain’t getting anything done, and you feeling traumatized, used, dis or un respected and deeply misunderstood while you doing it.

And not loved.

not loved like you need to be.

We all do different strategies we need to do to survive and thrive. And sometimes that means working jobs we kinda like but kinda hate, or straight up all the way hate cause we know we need cash or connections or they a bridge or it a trade off. but it’s important not to let them limit the power of our imaginations, our wildest black and brown queer and trans girlboy dreams. Because those dreams and our energy are our first resources. Sometimes they are the only things we own.

One of my longterm survival/growth strategies  has been to not deal with folks who make me feel like shit or deeply misunderstood/unloved/etc. Some folks call it “living in a bubble.” I call it, QTPOC can’t ever fucking afford to live in a bubble but we can indeed thrive quite well when we have folks who love and get basic important things about us around us.  This has looked many different ways. When I was 21, it meant leaving the United Stated on a Greyhound to move to Canada when my full scholarship ran out- to split the country for a city (Toronto) that had queer woman of color, mixed race girls who talked about it, radical South Asians, Sri Lankans, health care, bike lanes, and cheap vegetables. All things I was missing in New York. It meant, after feeling like I was carrying a toxic burden from trying to work as a scared yet fierce 20 year old with white anarchists who didn’t get or respect much of what I was about or believed for a few years, choosing to not work with white-dominated political organizations or scenes for a few years. I was part of that mid-90s wave of punks and anarchist people of color  who said fuck this to fighting the same stupid fights about racism, sexism, queerphobia, classism and ablism in spaces we didn’t start, shape or control, and going back home.

After a while, I built up my strength. And there were other kinds of relationships and work, including with white folks who weren’t dumb, that became possible. But I still consciously decide what I let in and what I don’t. SO when a friend was like, “Girl, there were so many whitefolks at Critical Resistence!!! WTF!!!” I say, really? I just noticed all the QTPOC everywhere. And she was like, are you kidding, you didn’t catch the scent of the anarchist armpit? And I go, it wasn’t important to focus my energy on that. You might call it optimism. You might call it self-preservation, or playing to our strengths not our weaknesses. Building ourselves stronger.

There is this thing inside me. It’s that crazy little voice I listen to in the center of my chest. A feminist cliché for sure but I still hang on to it. It my compass, my magnetic north. It tells me where to go. It’s my bullshit detector, inherited from my working-class white and middle-class brown ancestor ladies. My mama saying shit or get off the pot, my grandma who knew what was up in her  brownLankan community, family, island, trying to organize, trying not to get married, with all her body. I keep what they gave me, and I add to the recipe. Improvising, experimenting, playing. Always following that pull. Sometimes clearer than others. When I lit out for Canada at 21, it was the path that was all lit up. When I got older, Oya and Kali, they made the choices more complicated. Should I stay in Toronto where I have friends and love and work and an apartment, or pack up everything and move to Oakland because I hunger for QTPOC art peers and I always wonder what it would be like to go back? But I still hold on to her first. She the source of my sanity. And I hold on to her for so long, sometimes I forget how many folks, women of color, queer and trans people of color, we trained to think that voice crazy unimportant. How easy it is to relinquish back into a life of doing what you’re told, staying in grad school when we hate it, buying thing and watching a box not because of joyful relaxation but out of numbing habit.

When I was sitting in that job, I would think of INCITE meetings and Mangos With Chili meetings. Mangos meetings in Cherry’s hot pink living room, painting each other’s toenails and squinting at budgets. Cancelling and rescheduling when we got sick or had a brown girl overscheduled overwhelmed moment. Loaning each other twenty or a hundred bucks when we needed it. Taking turns freaking out, laughing and cracking up, driving two extra-loud no-muffler early 90s Toyotas through east Oakland hills and to the ocean to offer Yemaya a watermelon from Trader Joes. And how it felt like joy. And love.

The thing about the leap into revolutionary consciousness is that it feels gooooooood

good                         good

good

so so good

Like it feels right and like you are at the fucking center and you can make your dreams real and you can make them real anyway that works for you. Like that if you are a single woman of color single mama with a car that breaks down and you are late for a meeting this is not met with a  sniff from someone else/your boss about how there is a lot of “chaos” in your life and this “needs to be looked at” or, worse, ‘you should be more MINDFUL about the CHAOS in your life.” But the meeting, how it happens, how you do the work, gets figured out by you. Like for real, you can do it at your kitchen table. You can use your strengths. Your strengths are not just acknowledged, but understood. A meeting can look like two girls at a kitchen table in east O/ over some wine/ “check in” is an hour when you talk story about your girls and boys, stress, the thing that happened in the Trader Joe’s line, the horrible day job, you rub each others feet, and then shit  happens and it’s easy, or it’s not always easy, it’s work, but it’s like pushing out a baby when you’re squatting instead of having your legs in stirrups. Gravity and the natural force of the universe is working with you, you not working against it. Meetings can happen over G Chat. Meetings can happen on skype, at the Laundromat, at 2 AM. If your chronic illness or disability or lack of money means the way the goddamn meeting happens isn’t working, you can switch it up, and all those things are a source of value, the center of the head of the clit of embodied knowledge, not a source of shame.

It feels delicious. It’s not burnout. It’s not without childcare. It’s not dry. You understand what everyone is saying. When you don’t, you can ask and you can talk about it.

This is not to say that there is not argument, not disagreement, not labor, not tired. But the work, the work is your wildest dreams together. Feels like grow. Like life. Like juice. Like more not less. Like we getting some where. Like I never never get tired of saying we at the center, we grow, grow grow. Make our genius on shine. Make what we need, what our fam, our peops, our communities need. And we look so cute when we go it. And it so  sexy. So fresh. So wake up smiling and fighting. So beautiful resistance. SO what our ancestors did, what we wanted.

And if mainstream society doesn’t recognize- maybe it don’t matter at all. You don’t know me, but I know you. And I know me, and us, and what I don’t know I can learn. And I/we can be clear about where we putting in energy and work.

Our energy, our flyness, our genius, our dreams, our scar healing salves, our psychic powers, our gardens, they all our resources. We are not just “quadruple jeopardy.” We our own light.

Feels and tastes and looks: just like fresh, fresh water.

The thing about the leap into revolutionary consciousness is it slakes your queer colored girl thirst you had all your life. Just like the freshest river water.

Miracle makers, us. Have been and always will or could be.

–Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha

21. To be free

“If Black women were free, it would mean that everyone else would have to be free since our freedom would necessitate the destruction of all the systems of oppression.”

What does freedom look like to you? How are freedom and justice connected?

Complete the sentence

If I were free, it would mean______________________________________________________________ since my freedom __________________________________________________________.

Feel free to make an illustration of what freedom looks like to you.

High school english teacher Emily Chavez shared this exercise with her students

Click here genres-of-freedom-english-ii-to-be-free-responses to download example responses from Hillside High School students in Durham.

Kriti Sharma is a community based biologist, supporting and affirming life.

Kriti Sharma of UBUNTU and the UBUNTU Grows community garden writes:

If my dadima was free, she would have land to whom she could give generously, and who would give her back a humbling abundance of vegetables and spices, fruit trees, birds.  She would have land that would meet her, dance with her, offer her countless gifts for every measure of effort so lovingly given.  She would invite whomever she wanted to come visit her there, and even that at times of her own choosing.  Yet she was married at the age of 13, giving generously for decades to the rocky land of a marriage that grew so little of what sustained her.

If my nanima was free, she would tend to her own body with devotion, her skull-splitting migraines and gnawing anxiety subsiding to the peace of knowing there was nothing to do, nothing more important than her endlessly generous body healing, piece by piece.  By the grace of turmeric, aloe, amla, and some heavy doses of aspirin and Tiger Balm for good measure, she would love herself to health as fervently as she’d love her family to full bellies and healed wounds.  She would know her body as an end unto itself.

If I were free, I would stop the machine that keeps churning desi women out to gratefully give our very lives up, as moths die ecstatically in flame.  I would notice when I find myself acting in ways that compromise my health and well-being, and add to the suffering of other women of color.  I would be lucid about my confusion, acknowledging the force of patterns set into motion from the time of my birth, from the time of parents’ birth, from a time almost beyond memory.  I would uncover my inheritance, like heavy, buried treasure.

If my daughters were free, they would be born awake, their third eyes open.  Being born, they would know, immediately, where they were born: into oppression, which is like a wheel that was spun long ago and that we spin again and again and again through our lives and collective actions, giving it momentum.  With clear insight into the sources of their suffering, and the skills to end that suffering, they would act with a vigilance and power such as the world has never seen, slowing, slowing, slowing the wheel down.

My dadima is free.  She gives life to basil and marigolds, neighbors and children.  She laughs hard at good jokes, is good company to herself, and is learning against all odds to read.

My nanima is free.  She’s born now into another body, one that she’ll have every opportunity to use for good, one that she’ll love fully and well.

I am free.  I hold my life precious and brief, and diligently sow the seeds of liberation while I can, not a moment to lose.

My daughters will be free.  They will face the world bravely.  They will finish their own stories.

for more by Kriti Sharma download a free copy  her zine Moral Revolution below!

Kriti condensed Sarah Hoagland's Lesbian Ethics into Zine form!

Email us your completed sentences and/or illustrations at brokenbeautifulpress@gmail.com!

22. What You Got?: Radical Sharing

“When we started meeting early in 1974 after the NBFO first eastern regional conference, we did not have a strategy for organizing, or even a focus.  We just wanted to see what we had.”

What you got! We know you know some fierce powerful dynamic folk. What skills do you have? What skills do they have?  What stuff do you have that you can share? Set up a share where everyone in your chosen community gets a forum to express their knowledge/skills talents/resources. you can do it as often as you want. As many times as you want! See what that sharing opens up for you all collectively. Now that you know your people have certain skills what can ya’ll do together that you can’t do apart? What can you build/grow/create/produce?

Quirky Black Girl and SpiritHouse diaspora dweller Zachari Curtis hosted a book swap in DC.  Here is what she says about it:

Zachari Curtis is a Warrior Daughter

There was lots of yummy food and a ginormous amount of books which, miraculously, found new homes with fellow readers in the community. Picture it: A place where the books are free and delightful snacks are served while you make your selections. You bring books that have been with you for a while that you really want others to read. People who have read the book you want to read are nearby to talk to you about it if you have questions. And again, the books are free. Sound good? Well it makes a great recession-era party idea.

Many people said they had never been to a book swap, I certainly hadn’t until I hosted one so I just wanted to spread the idea around so maybe this can take root in other cities.

Anyway, go forth and swap.

At a recent Igniting the Kindred event held by Southerners on New Ground and Left Turn Magazine at Charis Bookstore in Atlanta participants created a “tree of dreams” to imagine how they could transform what they had into what they needed through the alchemy of community connection! This is what it looks like!

Sharing is magical.

ATLiens Dreaming of Sustainability

Elena Feinstein and Kyla Sweet created a wiki to help share skills and resources in their local community.  Here are Elena’s thoughts:

Elena is a radical librarian!

In the summer of 2008 a total of nine friends, all students or recent graduates of the School of Information and Library Science at UNC Chapel Hill, moved into three houses in the same small Carrboro, North Carolina neighborhood. They enjoyed the opportunities that living so close to each other presented, and began to discuss ways in which they could function as an extended household, from sharing meals to equipment and tools. These women kept hectic schedules, packed with classes, work, and volunteering, but all had nearly constant access to the internet. Some members of the group decided to launch a wiki to facilitate their neighborly interaction. Several other friends and neighbors were invited to participate, and the wiki now has sixteen users.

The wiki has a very simple structure. On the main page, each member has listed his or her “gots” and “wants.” Some of these items are tangible objects to loan, borrow, or give away, such as books on a particular topic or cuttings of plants. Many are offers or requests for the use of equipment, such as sewing machines or musical instruments. But the greatest number of both gots and wants center on skills and knowledge, and this has been the most interesting aspect of the wiki for its users. Some of this knowledge can be shared using the wiki itself, like the DIY health and beauty page or the embedded Google map of free neighborhood resources (think herb patches, bicycle tire pumps, lovely views), for example. Some of the most requested skills, such as lessons in web development and driving cars with manual transmissions, are being organized into informal classes or seminars. Users of the wiki have also delighted in examining each other’s gots lists to discover hidden talents or previously unknown interests, inspiring new friendships and deepening existing ones in the process. The wiki sidebar has served as a convenient place to make specific, time-sensitive requests, to sign up for lessons or interest groups that will communicate in more detail outside of the wiki, and to announce events, most commonly potlucks and crafting sessions.

One early success in the life of the wiki was the planning of a swap day. Held at one of the Carrboro houses, over the course of a weekend afternoon, participants brought clothes, music, household items, and snacks to give away. Because we knew each other, there were many directed swaps, in which the giver had a specific person in mind. While this event was ostensibly about trading material goods, the impulse to trade skills and services rose to the surface as ever. When one woman expressed indecision about whether to take a shirt that was a bit too large, another brought out a sewing machine and gave an impromptu tailoring lesson. The afternoon even ended with a haircut (a very commonly traded service) on the front stoop and plans for further trades of services and lessons.

While the success of these interactions owes much to the geographic and social proximity of the participants, we believe that it is possible to scale some of these principles up to function in larger communities. Even in this small group, we observe the extension of trust and generosity to people who were previously strangers. By employing a network of friend-of-a-friend connections, there is a sense that these people are somehow known and there is a predisposition to believe that their contributions would be valuable. Likewise, I think that, while the use of a wiki or other web tool was important for this particular group, these concepts apply outside of the online environment. The wiki served as an enhanced bulletin board, and a real bulletin board could perform in a similar way. One key to meaningful skill sharing is to identify your community and your goals. What is the community that you are trying to serve? How closely knit or loosely joined is it currently, and how would you like for it to be? Are you organizing a single interaction or something ongoing? What medium or media will be most useful for your community? What has worked well or not well in the past, and how can you learn from this? And always: what is it that inspires you to share and how can you pass along that spirit?

let us know how your skillshare goes…email us pictures and reflections at brokenbeautifulpress@gmail.com and we’ll share your skilltastickness with everyone!

23. Found Each Other: An Illustration

“The overwhelming feeling that we had is that after years and years we had finally found each other.”

Have you ever felt this way?  What might this look like? Make a drawing or a collage or a painting or anything.

Quirky Black Girl Leah made this video playlist in honor of finding you!!!

Leah is the official DJ of the Quirky Black Girl Movement!

This playlist is dedicated to those those she who have recently reunited with her self, her soul, that which completes her, her purpose…her joy.

xo,

Leah

Alice Smith, “Dream” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T8nWkii2wwo

Bob Marley, “Natural Mystic” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_r8HEJojWBs

NIna Simone, “Here Comes the Sun” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LSSIlx9hiu8

Santogold, “L.E.S. Artistes” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kCeZzW54a2o

Anthony David, “The Water/ The Fire” http://music.yahoo.com/track/44436202

Bilal, “Somethin to Hold On to” http://www.imeem.com/people/w7vIJa//music/-urrkRD5/something_to_hold_on_to/

Breaks Co-Op, “Question of Freedom” http://www.last.fm/music/Breaks+Co-op/_/Question+of+Freedom

The Cinematic Orchestra, “To Build a Home” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dhHKfSFGdUI

Coldplay, “Sparks” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ar48yzjn1PE

D’Angelo, “Found My Smile Again” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aP7nlYZN1fA

Jill Scott, ” Do You Remember” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z97o_rCDuPc

Maxwell, “Whenever, Whereever, Whatever” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RW_L69tyj0M

Jaimie Lidell, “Wait For Me” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=djB9cJW5Gs4

Marvin Gaye, “You’re a Wonderful One” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J_eB_-ia0I4

Goldfrapp, “Little Bird” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4l4PkcX8UEM

Maxwell, “Silently” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xYRGbjNfJ94

Nat King Cole, “Orange Colored Sky” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xdi97HHYJew

Quincy Jones, “Miss Celie’s Blues (Sister)” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gVxyiL9vWk0

Santogold, “I’m a Lady” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xQ94krsqFHg

Emiliana Torrini, “Big Jumps” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_CF7sER73TY

Neneh Cherry, “Woman” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z0W212af1uk

Jill Scott, “I Keep/Still Here” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OVH-WvSBx-8

D’Angelo, “Africa” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FgtjSPkuJ-E

Send us your celebration at brokenbeautifulpress@gmail.com!

24. Publishing: A Poetic Break

“We feel that it is absolutely essential to demonstrate the reality of our politics of other Black women and believe that we can do this through writing and distributing our work. The fact that individual Black feminists are living in isolation all over the country, that our own numbers are small, and that we have some skills in writing, printing and publishing makes us want to carry out these kinds of projects as a means of organizing Black feminists as we continue to do political work in coalition with other groups.”

Complete the poem:
feel
absolutely

reality writing fact

living
small
skills

carry continue

email us your poems at brokenbeautifulpress@gmail.com!

25. Structure

“We believe in collective process and a nonhierarchical distribution of power within our own group and in our vision of a revolutionary society.”

We know that groups and organizations today have many different structures and approaches to power and leadership. What are some of the structures that you have used in your work? What are some of the benefits or disadvantages of these structures?

For example

Project South is based in Atlanta, GA

Project South: Institute for the Elimination of Genocide and Poverty

uses a “flat pay scale”

Steph Guilloud organizes with Project South and Southerners on New Ground

Steph Guillioud of Project South teaches and reflects on that structural choice here:

A flat pay scale means every full-time staff earns the exact same salary and receives the same benefits. Our salaries increase by about 4% cost of living  every year. We have $38,000 annual salaries in 2009 for 5 full-time staff.

Historically, Project South has always had this structure as a way to reflect a collective staff formation. We have always considered a “collective” structure to be an evolving one, that strives for as much horizontal power as possible. We strive to confront and address systemic power differences including race, class, and gender that happen in intra-organizational work. We also believe that leadership and weight is held differently across the organization based on experience and strengths in particular areas. This leadership is not recognized by salary but by division of labor and authority over different areas of the organization.

The flat pay scale  is a strategic decision and policy implemented by board and staff to reflect our principles as an organization.  In our recent transition from the founder director to a collective Executive Leadership Team, we re-visited the policy and re-affirmed it based on the same principles. The flat scale allows for deeper and more frank conversations about wages, compensation, class, and movement work.

what is a structural choice that you are working with?  how is it going? email us at brokenbeautifulpress@gmail.com

26. The Manifesta

“As Black feminists and Lesbians we know that we have a very definite revolutionary task to perform and we are ready for the lifetime of work and struggle before us.”

Lifetime of work and struggle!!!!!!! What makes this worth it for you? The faces of little revolutionaries deserving the best world ever? The mandates of elders who taught you how to be fierce? Write a manifesta about your own lifetime of commitment and what that means to you. Don’t forget to let us know who it is dedicated to!!!

For example guerilla mama and outlaw midwife Mai’a Williams wrote this beautiful Manifesta

Outlaw Midwives: A Manifesta

LIFE AND DEATH

Every child will not be born alive or may die in infanthood.
Early motherhood is the interplay of life and death and sometimes filled with sadness and loss, with joy and sweetness.
Always death is interwoven in to the fabric of the living moment. Cells reproduce and die like the rhythm of breathing, like the opening and closing of a gate.
We center, not simply the biology of birth, but relationships we have with people we take care of and those that take care of us.
And mourn daily the dead and the missing, the actions of our governments and other powerful entities that kill and maim babies and mothers, the destruction of resistance communities’ next generation.  That destruction privileges many of us with resources allowing us more reproductive choices.
The pro-life movement focuses on birth control and abortions, we go deeper. We ought to be able to decide when, and how we will conceive and with whom, who and what practices will be part of our pregnancy, what we allow into our body, where we give birth and with whom, how we feed our children, etc. Our intelligence, agency, and subjectivity are central. The health of the next generation depends on the psychological, physical and spiritual health of the mother today, our levels of stress, support networks, confidence and joy.

MEDICAL VIOLENCE
The medical system’s structural and physical violence denies us  the full expression of our agency. Doctors and nurses routinely manipulate information for the convenience of the medical system and its workers. They force us to have strangers’ hands, medical instruments and machines on our body, to undergo unnecessary and dangerous procedures such as hormonal birth control, surgery, genital mutilation and sterilization, experiment on our bodies and psyches, verbally threaten the ours and children’s lives, lie to them, and sexually harass and abuse us with little impunity. They deny us our basic human rights, humanity, moral expression, personal and communal wisdom, cultural understandings of body and being, full access to the power of reproduction and creation, and our connection to our children, loved ones, culture, kinships and cosmos.

In order to realize resistance and liberatory revolutionary communities that care for all their members, we co-create respectful spaces for folks to make their decisions about their body, family, communities, life and death.

NATURAL AND NORMAL CHILDBIRTH

The concept of ‘natural’ childbirth or lifestyle is dependent on the concept of the ‘artificial and that the ‘normal’ birth concept is dependent on the existence of the technological and medical models of birth. So natural/normal birth did not exist before modern western birth culture.

Mostly pregnant middle and upper class educated white women have the economic and racial privilege and choices to have a ‘natural/normal’ birth. These women, a small segment of the global birthing world creates their natural experiences by exoticising, fetishizing, imitating and co-opting the practices and images of 3rd world brown women childbearing cultures. Natural/normal concept is really code for ‘preferred’, it is the elite white women who have the preferred childbirth and normal body. Their body, lifestyle, childbearing, mothering, and inevitably, their children set the standard through their privilege and access for what is normal and natural.
It’s not about ‘natural’ birth, vs. medical interventions vs. Cesarean. It is about empowerment.

Many midwives in the West have fought so hard for legal recognition for their craft that all other considerations about birth have become secondary or tertiary. The privileging of ‘certified’ and ‘insured’ midwives has been not only negligent but destructive to women of color, the queer community, sexual and trauma survivors, imprisoned women, folks with disabilities and many more marginalized peoples in the birth community and in the world at large.

Imagine for most of human history midwives were just women who had given birth or were the sister or the mother or had been around for births and knew the rituals, the songs, the calls that that community had developed around the emergence of a new being into the world. Perhaps a well of community knowledge held by various men and women in the community. Some oral traditions. Drawings that acted as guides and recorders of history. Helpful herbs. Folks had watched other mammals bring forth their young. Most likely they knew the particular woman giving birth. Her temperment, her favorite foods, her moods.

They were the mother, sister, aunt, cousin, grandmother, neighbour who came by and helped. The women who had a knack. Who were in charge of gathering and drying herbs. Who took it upon themselves to care.
We cannot afford to romanticize the past, nor believe in an edenic before, but this is the way birth still is happening in a good many parts of the world right now.

Right now 300,000 women are giving birth. Most of the babies will live. A few will die.
It is a joyful sad knowledge.

A LACK OF EXPERTISE

We are not the authority, nor the expert. It is that lack of authority and expertise that is our greatest strength. We know what we know, do not claim to know more than we know, and we follow the birthing person’s leadership.

A community is only as empowered as its mothers.

Before the beginning of human history, human beings have controlled their reproductive lives. Folks found leaves, roots, sap, smoke, dance, prayers, animals and more that helped to regulate fertility and those processes continue to this day. They choose persons and processes that honor their reproductive lives. And we are willing to break the law and go to prison to honor and empower the mother, the child, and the community.

It can be difficult to receive that training and apprenticeship when doors refuse to open because we are from a marginalized community. Access is not solely (or even primarily) dependent upon our passion, ethics, intelligence, or dedication. We get all the training that we can. Teach each other. Read everything we can. Talk to everyone who will talk to us. Develop a strong intuition with our own bodies, minds, lives, with the universe. We never stop learning, because the more we know, the more that we can offer. But we don’t deny folks the right to choose for themselves what kind of pregnancy, birth, and child caring they want. We explain to folks what we know and what we don’t know and let them make their decision.

CREATING REVOLUTIONARY COMMUNITIES OF LOVE

We envision anti-violence safer communities where mothers and children heal from reproductive violence, because it is when we are whole and confident in our own leadership, are we able to co-create healthy communities.

Communities in which loyalty to a mother’s choice is 99 percent of being a midwife and in which we define ‘motherhood’ as love by any means necessary.

Communities in which we care for ourselves developing spiritual and physical awareness so that we can hold the space, the energy, the vision for folks to make decisions that center freedom, community and revolutionary love.

We must mother ourselves. Hold ourselves the way that we hold our children. And know that our wisdom is stronger and more knowledgeable and relevant than outside expertise. We must live the lives that are given to us. And trust others to do the same. For the sake of our survival. For the sake of our ancestresses. For the sake of our communities. For the sake of love.

email us your manifestas at brokenbeautifulpress@gmail.com!