www.communityspeak.wordpress.com

2nd Annual Community Writing Intensive

That's What's UP!!!!!

from my sista Adele

note: I'm posting this in it's entirety here so you can read it without the messed up comments some folks wrote on the original site. This is the link:http://news.newamericamedia.org/news/view_article.html?article_id=6b90abf49154b995ca8d7d9de830d805

love,

lex

Community Theatre Teaches ICE Raid Survival Skills

El Mensajero, News Report, Clarisse Céspedes, Translated by Elena Shore, Posted: Aug 09, 2008

Editor’s Note: A group of college students in San Jose, Calif., is using interactive theatre to teach immigrants what to do to avoid being arrested by immigration agents. Clarisse Céspedes reports for Spanish-language newspaper El Mensajero in San Francisco.


SAN JOSE, Calif. — From the Aztecs to the Greeks, civilizations around the world have used theatre as their primary means of mass communication. Important messages crucial to the survival of the people were broadcast through plays, something that has been lost with the passage of time. Today, in a city known as the birthplace of high-tech, a group of Hispanic students is resurrecting popular theatre, and using it to help instruct immigrants in an urgent task: protecting them from ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement).

The series was organized by Students Advocates for Higher Education (SAHE) from San Jose State Univesity, COCHITLEHUAL-LI ("dream" in the Mexican indigenous language Nahuatl) from Evergreen Community College, and LULAC (the League of United Latin American Citizens).

In its opening performance, the curtain goes up and various workers appear who are suddenly interrupted by immigration agents asking for their papers. They perform the scene twice: The first time, the workers get arrested; the second time they don’t. The only difference in the two scenes is the way the workers respond to the ICE agents.

The MC, student Luis Ruelas, leads a discussion with the audience, asking them what they would do in real life to avoid falling into the hands of immigration authorities, and the best way to get out of it if they do.

More and more people now carry what they call a “red card,” an information card that can be shown to ICE agents by immigrants who want to avoid saying anything that could incriminate them. The card explains that the worker has the right to remain silent and ask for a lawyer. But few people know that they should also have a phone card with them so they can make a call if they are arrested, and a separate piece of paper with the phone numbers of their emergency contacts. “You know this, but in the moment you get nervous and you forget what you have to do. Listening to all of this, I remember and I feel safer,” explains José Antonio, who works in roofing. “You have to speak forcefully, not bow down, if something like this happens,” he adds.

Lawyers Mark Silverman of the Immigrants Legal Resource Center in San Francisco and Richard Hobbs of Santa Clara County tell the audience all the details they need to know, and advise them to learn to fit in and go unnoticed. They suggest that they should maintain their cars in good condition and not drink when they go to parties. “These are difficult times and you have to be more ready than ever,” says Cecilia Tabares, a mother who lives in San Jose.

YOU DON’T HAVE TO OPEN THE DOOR

This is one of the hardest lessons. When the curtain goes up again and shows two women talking in their home, a groan can be heard from the audience. “They even go to your house, with your family… That hurts,” observes Manuel, an audience member.

Raids on people’s homes have been the distinguishing mark of U.S. immigration policy in recent years, opening a wound that does not heal.

The audience learns that nothing in the world can force them to open the door to a stranger because their family is at stake and they don’t want their children to live through the drama of seeing their parents arrested. Even if the agents ask for someone who doesn’t live there, even if they say they are the police, the door should not be opened.

The students ask for a volunteer from the audience and a woman climbs on stage. She knows her role well without being told what to do, and although it appears that the ICE agents are about to knock the door down, she stays calm. She isn’t intimidated by an arrest warrant. She asks them to slip their identification under the door and when they say it doesn’t fit, she asks them to leave.

This concludes the scene that students call "the migraine," the nightmare scenario that will stay with audience members for years to come.

CONFIDENTIAL INFORMATION

When the curtain goes up again, two students are sitting in their dorm room, in an episode the performers call "Detained Dreams." One of them is talking on the phone to his mother in Mexico.

Immigration agents arrive and ask for someone who isn’t there. In passing, they ask the student who opened the door where he’s from and where his identification is. Telling them that he’s Mexican results in his arrest.

The audience learns that universities and community colleges keep information about their students completely confidential.

When the scene is repeated, the actor who plays the student tells the agents that if they want personal information, they’ll have to go to the university’s administrative office, and the curtain goes down to the sound of applause.

Freedom Haikus by Kriti Sharma

A sister of mine wrote these beautiful haikus in response to the continued detainment and violence by the ICE. May we remember that love is stronger than any wall.

From Kriti:
I wrote these haikus during writing group this Monday with Ziyad Busaileh's disappearance heavy on my mind. Baba Ziyad is about my father's age. And the second article is about Herbert Abdul, a Zimbawean immigrant who was taken to Etowah Detention Center. After he returned home, the article says, his four-year-old daughter climbed into bed with her parents just to make sure her father was still there. These Black August haikus are for every parent behind bars.

it hurts to know that

your wild unrelenting heart

beats now behind bars

wherever they took

your cherished body, father,

i am there with you

no one breaks kinship

with barbed wire and furtive trucks.

i am your daughter

your ID card is

a pocket-sized farce. they don't

know your sacred name

no one disappears.

never created, never

destroyed, our shared pulse

may i follow you

wherever you are, ever

witness to your life

For background..this is the article Kriti sent to our community a few days ago:
Y'all, this elder lived just down the road in Raleigh. Now he's at the Etowah County Detention Center in Alabama (read the article at the bottom of the email for more information on Etowah - it sounds like a horrendous place). MASF (Muslim American Society Freedom) is working on a "take action" campaign (Khalilah Sabra seems to be the point person on it). I don't know what to tell y'all in the meantime.

Here we are just living in the South. We're surrounded by all these black holes -- places that our people seem to disappear into, like Blackwater headquarters, or the Etowah Detention Center, or the local prison, or the military base down the road. Right here, part of the geography of the south, these places that maps are silent - so eerily silent - about. But they're real places holding real people who have real families. The land between here and there is unbroken - from Durham and Raleigh we could reach Etowah County Alabama, I suppose, by road. When do we go? When do we take back the entirety of this land, reclaim these places that have been fenced off and severed from the whole?

kriti

ICE Detains 60-Year-Old Palestinian Cardiac Patient Without Cause

By Dave Kaiser

WASHINGTON (Arab News) Aug. 2, 2008 – An investigation has begun into the detention by Immigration and Custom Enforcement (ICE) authorities of Ziyad Busaileh, a 60-year-old Palestinian immigrant residing in Raleigh, North Carolina.

Busaileh was arrested July 22 as he arrived home from a doctor's visit; he is a diabetic and cardiac patient of Carolina Caridiology Consultants, P.A.

"Upon arrest, Busaileh was not allowed to retrieve his eye glasses or medications (he is recovering from a recent surgery), was denied the right to make a phone call, strip searched at the detention center and subjected to a rigorous interrogation by ICE authorities," said Khalilah Sabra, North Carolina director of the Muslim American Society's MAS Freedom (MASF).

Sabra said that Busaileh was not offered legal counsel and was handicapped by a limited command of English (no interpreter was provided).

Busaileh was pressured under the threat of never seeing his family again "for the next five-years," into signing a document he could not possibly have fully comprehended.

Since entering the US, originally seeking treatment for the life-threatening health condition of a triplet son, Busaileh, whose own health began to deteriorate a few years ago, reported for voluntary registration when the 2002 National Security Entry/Exit Registration System was implemented shortly after Sept. 11 attacks.

Subsequent to registration, Busaileh, a tax-paying sandwich shop worker and father of four, checked in periodically by phone to verify his status — being told each time, "not to worry.

ICE officials routinely arrest immigrants who have been convicted of serious crimes, or who have outstanding warrants against them, however, prior to his arrest, Busaiyeh had not violated any US law, and received no prior notice requiring him to surrender to ICE authorities.

Busaileh's detainment is one the latest examples of how immigration officials violate the basic rights of persons whom they arrest.

To compound matters, MAS Freedom has learned that on Tuesday, July 29, Busaileh was transferred to the Etowah County Detention Center in Gadsen, Alabama — a facility known to provide insufficient medical care, restrict necessary dietary needs, violate detainees' rights to legal privilege and attorney-client communication, and for denying detainees the right to make phone calls.

Detainees of the facility have also complained of being subjected to three and four day periods each week of 24-hour lockdown — anyone complaining or talking subsequently punished by having their food placed directly onto the floor of their cell.

All persons, regardless of their status deserve humane and just treatment.

However, Busaileh has been denied the right to receive the prescribed dosage of his life-sustaining diabetes and heart medications.

Despite a July 25 statement provided by his treating physician acknowledging that his condition (ischemic cardiomyopathy) is such that he cannot sustain increased amounts of stress, and further asking that the patient/detainee be released to his home — Busaileh remains at the detention center — his fate and health in certain jeopardy.

MAS Freedom is preparing a letter of vigorous protest to ICE officials in Washington D.C. and North Carolina, as well as officials of the Etowah County Detention Center, and will continue to monitor and report on the Busaileh case as it develops.

URL: http://www.arabnews.com/?page=4&section=0&article=112333&d=2&m=8&y=2008

Original Story: http://www.masnet.org/takeaction.asp?id=5169

Southern Inhospitality and Alabama's Etowah County Detention Center

Atlanta Magazine writer Steve Fennessy depicts Etowah County Detention as by far the most hostile ICE holding in the country – affirming MAS Freedom's concern for the well-being of Ziyad Busaileh

Among immigrants, the Etowah County Detention Center in Gadsden, Alabama, has achieved a notorious reputation. Glenn Fogle, an Atlanta immigration attorney, has made the two-hour drive to the Etowah jail many times to meet with clients. "It's the worst place I've ever been to," Fogle says of the jail, not far across the Georgia-Alabama border.

ATLANTA MAGAZINE.COM Hundreds of illegal aliens swept up by Atlanta immigration officers end up at a remote jail in Alabama, where conditions are bleak, the food is meager, and hope fades fast.

Herbert Abdul is an accountant by training, but he hasn't been in that line of work since leaving his native Zimbabwe eight years ago. There, he was a frequent protester of Robert Mugabe, who in 1980 became president of the landlocked southern African country. In recent years, Mugabe has solidified his reputation as a malicious despot—rigging elections to stay in power, destroying 700,000 homes of those who support his opposition, and presiding over a catastrophic economy that has the highest inflation rate in the world. Upwards of 3 million Zimbabweans have fled Mugabe's rule. One of those refugees was Herbert Abdul, who says he was jailed numerous times in Zimbabwe, where police beat the soles of his feet with batons and forced him to sing songs in praise of Mugabe.

In 1999, Abdul came to America. In Cincinnati, where his aunt lived, Abdul met a woman at a party. They married, and he hired an attorney in Ohio to begin the long process of winning a green card. But the marriage soon fell apart, and Abdul moved to Atlanta in 2000, where he reconnected with a woman he'd known from Zimbabwe who was also living here in metro Atlanta. They eventually married, had two children, and settled in Lilburn. Abdul also started a cleaning business, stenciling the name of the business on the side of his pickup.

One morning last November, Abdul was loading his truck in front of his home when he noticed some SUVs cruising slowly down his street. They stopped near his driveway. Three men got out and approached Abdul. At first, they asked about getting a cleaning estimate, but Abdul explained that, despite what was printed on the truck door, he was now in the flooring business. One man asked Abdul his name, and Abdul told him. Then the man produced a badge and explained that they were immigration officers with a warrant for his arrest. Abdul was being picked up because he'd missed an immigration court hearing in Ohio. Federal officials had mailed him a notice of the court date, but it had gone to his old Ohio address, so he never saw it. When he didn't show up in court, Abdul's name went onto a fugitive list kept by immigration officials. Which is how Herbert Abdul found himself handcuffed in his front yard, loaded into an SUV, and driven to Downtown Atlanta, where he became one of the 283,115 aliens detained last year by the federal government.

Alien detainees are not, by definition, criminals. This may seem like a politically loaded statement, given the debate that has sprung up about what to do with the 12 million illegal immigrants living in the United States. But it's true: From a legal perspective, an undocumented alien in the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement is, quite simply, one party in a civil matter. A crime may have put them in the ICE crosshairs, but for many like Abdul, it is a procedural snafu that lands them behind bars while their cases are resolved. Usually this takes weeks, but it sometimes can take months or, occasionally, years.

One problem with the current system is that ICE officers are basically cops without a jail. There are few, if any, federal facilities devoted to immigrant detainees, so ICE must farm the job out—to county jails, to city lockups, and to privately run prisons. In the five years leading up to 2006, the number of detainees tripled, meaning the U.S. government now relies even more on local lockups. All together, there are 330 facilities nationwide that contract with the feds to house their detainees. One of the most popular is in Stewart County, southwest of Macon. Run by Corrections Corporation of America, the facility houses nothing but detainees. In Atlanta, city officials have found room to house a few hundred at the Atlanta City Detention Center. That's where Herbert Abdul spent the first eight weeks of his detention. ICE rules require that detainees be separated from the criminal population behind bars, so Abdul's jail mates were other immigrants caught up in the ICE web—some were waiting to be transferred to other facilities, others were waiting for ICE to secure them travel papers to their home countries, still others were waiting for their day in immigration court.

Everybody, though, was waiting. Abdul played chess with other inmates. He took part in pickup games of basketball and soccer. From the rec yard, detainees could see the Atlanta skyline. During the day, they could wander in and out of their cells. But it was still jail.

Abdul, who's thirty-four, wears a toothy grin and a cell phone on his hip that chirps every few minutes. His English is impeccable, which makes sense, as it's the primary language spoken in Zimbabwe. Despite assumptions Americans may make from his name, Abdul is a Christian; while he was in jail he took part in informal prayer sessions with other inmates. As the weeks went by behind bars, it was his faith, he says, that kept him sane. "I said to myself, 'I know I'm gonna get out. I'm innocent,'" Abdul says. "I used to pray. I thought, 'Lord, you know I am innocent.'"

The day Abdul was arrested, he shared a booking cell with several other detainees in the basement of 77 Forsyth Street, which houses ICE offices and immigration court. Soon they were split up, but one day in January, as Abdul was getting ready to be transferred to Etowah County Detention Center in Alabama, he recognized an incoming detainee as one of the men he'd shared a cell with months before. Abdul asked him where he was coming from. "Etowah," the man said. "It's not good."

Among immigrants, the Etowah County Detention Center in Gadsden, Alabama, has achieved a notorious reputation. Glenn Fogle, an Atlanta immigration attorney, has made the two-hour drive to the Etowah jail many times to meet with clients. "It's the worst place I've ever been to," Fogle says of the jail, not far across the Georgia-Alabama border. "To be locked in this tiny cell for twenty-one hours a day is horrendous."

Allison Neal, staff attorney for the Alabama chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, collects correspondence from detainees at Etowah. One letter, dated February: "We are kept under a 21-hour lockdown; no access to fresh outside air, or outdoor recreational activities . . . Staffs are very verbal[ly] abusive." Another letter, dated May: "I previously requested for transfer several months ago, because of lack of outdoor exercise at Etowah, my request was denied because of a contention that Etowah meets the 'minimum standards.'" Another letter, signed by thirty-two detainees in August, 2004: "The amount of food served us as adults is less than enough for a five-year-old child. The daily servings are beans and cornbread; at times we are served mashed potatoes or rice, but the amount is two tablespoons, or when there is no cornbread, one slice of bread." Detainees have also complained about the cost of using the phones, about being forced into overcrowded cells, about being placed into segregation, and about inadequate medical care. To protest conditions at the jail, detainees have occasionally gone on hunger strikes.

Abdul remembers being led in handcuffs and leg irons into Etowah his first day there. Guards, he says, taunted the new arrivals, taking bets on who would get deported. Abdul was given the khaki uniform of a detainee and a pair of flip-flops. He was crammed into a cell with three other men. There were three hours of freedom each day—one after breakfast, one after lunch, one after dinner. "How do four men spend twenty-one hours a day in a cell?" Abdul says. "I slept and slept. I looked at pictures of my kids. I read the Bible."

After several weeks, Abdul was moved to another unit, where detainees had daytime access to a common area. But when he complained about preferential treatment given to one inmate, he was moved to a unit where the inmates were dressed not in khaki, as he was, but in red. These were the violent detainees, he was told. Abdul was put in a cell with a hulking inmate everyone called Congo. "He was talking to himself. He wouldn't take his eyes off me."

One morning Congo announced that today he was going to kill Abdul. Abdul started rattling the bars of the cell, ringing the buzzer. Guards finally opened the door.

The federal government pays Etowah County $35.12 a day for each detainee at the jail. The contract was hammered out in 2000, when the feds helped finance an $8 million addition to the jail. The contract doesn't expire until 2015. Patrick Simms, the Etowah County CEO, believes that Etowah is among the cheapest, if not the cheapest, facility in the country when it comes to housing inmates. Judging by his voice, this isn't meant as a boast.

"Looking back, I would have advised [county officials] not to get into it," he says. This year, revenues from the contract have brought in about $300,000 to county coffers. "That's about one mile of paved road," Simms says with a rueful chuckle. "The only one who's making a profit here is the sheriff."

The sheriff? In fact, a quirk in Alabama state law allows sheriffs to keep any money that is left over in the food budget after inmates are fed. No, not his office. Him. Personally. For instance, $3 of every $35.12 is set aside for meals, Simms says. If the sheriff can feed a detainee for less than that per day, he can pocket the difference. "It's an incentive for him to go as cheap as possible feeding inmates to maximize profits," Simms says. And because it's personal income, the sheriff is not obligated to disclose how much he profits. Interestingly, the sheriff of Etowah County, James Hayes, gets only $1.75 a day from the state to feed his normal criminal population; the extra $1.25 he gets from the feds to feed ICE detainees is, so to speak, icing on the cake. Hayes's office did not return calls seeking comment.

But according to Abdul, the food for detainees was sometimes worse than the food county inmates got. "The county [inmates] that would come in the unit to fix or replace something were always happy with the food and would talk about pizza and other menus," Abdul wrote in a letter of complaint. "An apple a day keeps the doctor away. In [Etowah], forget about seeing fruit unless you're watching a TV or a [corrections officer] eating." In fact, in the three months Abdul spent at Etowah, he remembers eating one apple—and it was given to him by a guard. Abdul says he lost ten pounds in jail.

Jail conditions for detainees have recently garnered some attention. Last December, the Department of Homeland Security's inspector general released a fifty-four-page assessment of five detention facilities (none of them in Georgia or Alabama). Among its findings: Five out of thirty-six detainees on suicide watch weren't monitored sufficiently; at one facility, eight of nine pest control reports indicated evidence of rats and cockroaches; at another jail, detainees were served undercooked poultry; one detainee was given lockdown for wearing a religious head garment. Other findings included slow response time to detainee complaints, insufficient recreation time, and family visits cut off early. In one facility investigated by DHS, officials found that the property officer had stolen more than $300,000 in personal property from detainees. In a San Diego jail, a female detainee said a guard sexually assaulted her; the guard was fired. Despite the inspector general's findings, all five facilities had garnered an "acceptable" ranking during ICE's own inspections.

In July, the General Accounting Office inspected twenty-three detention facilities (again, none in Georgia or Alabama) and found that the phone systems available to detainees often weren't working properly. At one facility, deputies were armed with Tasers, even though ICE standards prohibit the use of them. The study also pointed out that ICE had never severed a contract with a jail for falling short of meeting standards.

The ACLU has filed three lawsuits to improve conditions at jails in Texas and California. In a report it issued in July, the ACLU's National Prisons Project said that since 2004, "it appears that at least twenty individuals have died in ICE custody."

On April 26, Abdul was freed on $25,000 bond. With Fogle as his lawyer, Abdul is seeking political asylum so he can remain in the U.S. with his wife and two children, both of whom are American citizens. Abdul worries that his history of anti-Mugabe activities—he maintains a website that highlights Mugabe's atrocities—have made him a marked man back home. "I know if I go back, in six months I'll be dead," he says.

Unfortunately, Abdul couldn't have picked a worse place in America in which to plead his case. When it comes to asylum cases, Atlanta is, statistically speaking, one of the toughest immigration courts in America.

While he waits, Abdul is rebuilding his flooring business. At night, his four-year-old daughter still climbs into bed with her parents, just to make sure her father is still there.

support critical resistance in durham, nc

We Have What we NEED

"I wrote it because I wanted to talk abut blackwomanslaughter in a way that could not be unfelt or ignored by anyone who heard it with a hope perhaps of each one of us doing something within our immediate living to change to change this destruction."

"We are too important to each other to waste ourselves in silence."
- Audre Lorde in a prefatory essay to Need: A Chorale for Black Woman Voices


In 1979 Barbara Smith sent Audre Lorde a news clipping via snail mail. Yet another black woman in her community in Roxbury had been found dead. Over these four months, during which 12 black women were killed in the black nieghborhods of Boston, black feminists, led by black lesbian feminists built a coalitional movement to respond, using public art, poetry, self-defense, publishing and political education. Barbara Smith and Lorraine Bethel were editing what would become the foundation black feminist collection, Conditions 5: The Black Women's Issue. Audre Lorde wrote Need: A Chorale for Black Woman Voices in response to this wave of murders. The energy and analysis forged in the words and promises exchanged between black feminists at that moment grew into a broad movement that lives, waiting and growing in those of us hungry for the words that were never meant to survive.

This past Monday, not yet 30 years after Barbara Smith's letter to Audre Lorde, Moya sent an email with a link to a news story:

http://abclocal.go.com/wpvi/story?section=news/take_action&id=6227125

This woman is black
so her blood is shed into silence.

A building full of neighbors heard the screams of this survivor while she was being sexual assaulted in her home, but were at a loss to actually act against this violence in their community. They didn't know how to respond, they didn't want to believe what was happening. So they kept their doors closed. They went to sleep.

This story is important for a number of reasons. As Moya points out it is yet another instance of silence within the black community about violence against a black woman coming on the heels of Megan Williams, Dunbar Village, R. Kelley's Acquittal and more. This is what breaks our backs.

I also think this story, literal silence in the moment of violence, is important for what it demonstrates more generally. Our silence, as oppressed communities about the gendered violence that disproportionately impacts our communities is glaring, harmful, devastating. We generally really feel that in a racist police state, and individualist capitalist state, a fear-filled falling apart place we don't have the resources to respond to violence even when we hear it happening, on the news and in our buildings every night.

But if we have each other, we do have what we need to take care of each other, hold each other accountable, keep each other safe and whole. If we have each other we do.

And I say, thank the Lorde, we have in Need a resource for transformation and a means to open us these impossible conversations about the real costs of gendered violence in our communities. The task of the poet is to say the unsayable, and Audre Lorde, may she never be forgotten, literally gives us the tools to open our mouths.

The UBUNTU Artistic Respons committee which convened in Durham, North Carolina in the midst of the Duke Lacrosse Rape Case, used Need (in addition to other poems and the documentary NO! by Aishah Simmons) to break open rooms of people and to instigate real discussions about the impact of gendered violence against black women WITHIN black communities, at the hands of other black people.

When my father, a person professionally trained and personally prone to debate and argument read Need he had no arguments to make. He told me that reading the piece was simply a moment in his education. He compared it to a moment in high school when he watched a film that documented all the shaven hair, all the bodily ashes, all the teeth and bones of the victims of the Nazi holocaust. He said that a mass of violence, an unimaginable horror had become visible and real to him in Audre Lorde's words. He said there was no question about whether this was true, whether it was relevant, whether it impacted him. He said now I know. The only question is what we do.

This is the Summer of Our Lorde, when we transform silence into action and power. I want to ask us to read and share Need available for download via:http://letterstoaudre.wordpress.com/need-end-violence-against-women-of-color-now/

with everyone we can share it with. Let us read it with other women in our communities, let us print our copies and give them to our families. Let us build a fire of healing that can ignite our communities into the conversations we need in order to build the trust, connection and analysis that we need to work together for survival, safety and love in our communities.

love always (in the hands of Audre),
lex

p.s. for support and resources as you use Need in your community, email brokenbeautifulpress@gmail.com anytime.

On the Rebirth of Afro/Arab Feminism

Way back in the 1980's Carole Hadadd and June Jordan decided that Black and Arab feminists were meant for each other, crucial to each others struggles, central to each other's liberation. Each other.

Us.

And something else happened in the 1980's I was born...and luckily that wasn't all. Actually on this exact day a little less than 2.5 decades ago, Nadia was born too. Thank all the directions of our prayers, thank everyone who made it possible that we met. Thank June from beyond, thank Carole. Thank the Lorde and everyone in between.

Check out Nadia's blog www.nosnowhere.wordpress.com and her upcoming brilliant work with and at the Allied Media Conference in Detroit next weekend.

I love this sista. I'm so glad she was born today. I'm so glad that she gives me the chance to be reborn...remembering who I am everyday.

all love and peaceful intentions to and through Nadia!!!!

love,

lex

Women, Rock! and Politics Conference 2008
Institute for Women's Studies, UGA
Athens, Georgia

Everyone is welcome to this free conference. For information on local
accommodations, registration, and other details, go to http://www.uga.edu/iws/wrp08.html

Athens locals don't miss keynote performance by queer and feminist rock icon
Gretchen Phillips, 6pm Saturday
(http://www.queermusicheritage.us/aug2005.html) and after-conference party
with guest dj Melissa York.

Conference Program

Friday, May 30, Edge Hall, Hugh Hodgson School of Music, UGA

5:00 Opening reception

5:30 Welcome and Introductions

6:00 Fred Maus “52 Girls” A talk on the women of the B52s

7:00 Latin-American Scenes
Lesley Feracho , “Contesting the Nation :Women and Rock in Latin America”
Patricia Vergara “Funkeiras: Transgressing the Place of the Poor, Black, and
Female in Rio de Janeiro”

SATURDAY, May 31, Tasty World, downtown Athens

12:00 Brunch Buffet

1:00 Girls Rock Camps Collective, “Creativity, Community and Confidence
through Rock & Roll: Girls Rock Camps”

2:15 Rocking the Margins
Matt Jones, "(Re)discovering the Music of Judee Sill"
Sarah Cozort, “Women in Experimental Music”

3:00 Break

3:15 Stella Pace, “Riot Grrrl Self-Esteem Now: A Multimedia Performance”

4:00 Hip/Hop Feminisms
Ebony Noelle Golden, “Sonic Soul: Erykah Badu's Performance Practice”
Sarah Young Ngoh, “Black Motherhood in Hip/Hop and R&B Music”
Marnie Binfield, “Women’s Contributions to ‘Conscious Rap’”

5:45 Break

6:00 Keynote Performance/Presentation Gretchen Phillips

9:00- After-party at Tasty World with special DJ Melissa York, of The Butchies
midnite



UGA to host second annual conference on Women, Rock! and Politics

Athens, Ga.—The Institute for Women’s Studies at the University of Georgia is
hosting its second annual conference, Women, Rock and Politics, from Friday,
May 30 to Saturday, May 31.

This year’s conference brings together a great range of talks, images, and
performances on topics ranging from Girls Rock Camps, to hip hop feminism, to
the riot grrrl movement, to women in rock in Latin America.

The conference will begin on Friday at 5:00 p.m. with a reception and
presentations in Edge Hall at the Hugh Hodgson School of Music on the
University of Georgia campus, followed by a talk on the women of the B-52s by
renowned music scholar Fred Maus (UVA). Saturday's presentations and
performances, including keynote performance by rock icon Gretchen Phillips,
and conference after-party with guest dj Melissa York, will be at Tasty World in
downtown Athens. For a full program please visit www.uga.edu/iws.

The conference is free and open to the public. Edge Hall is located in the Hugh
Hodgson School of Music, Third Floor, at 250 River Rd on the eastside of
campus. Tasty World is located at 312 East Broad Street in downtown Athens,
Ga. For more information contact the Institute for Women’s Studies at 706-
542-2846.




Molly Moreland Myers
Public Relations Coordinator
Institute for Women's Studies
University of Georgia
706-542-0066 (voice)
706-542-0049 (fax)
momolly@uga.edu

Dear MaComere: Dream Come True

Yesterday, J, my number one comadre, insisted that I stall my strawberry picking adventure in order to cradle her for a 10 minute nap. Powerful woman that she is, spirit healer that she is, listener for another world that she is, I trusted that there was something divine in her whine. I waited. After the nap our mailman knocked on our door with the first package that I've ever had to sign for since we've lived here. And inside were copies of the book you see above the literary journal of the Association of Caribbean Women Writers and Scholars. MaComere. The word MaComere has no real translation into English...its translation into Spanish would be mi comadre. It is the way women in the French influenced Caribbean name the women who the grew up with, the woman who they tell everything. It means best friend, comrade, sister in everything. To say it literally we have to invent a much needed phrase "my co-mother". Since Audre Lorde said "we can learn to mother ourselves," I believe that MaComere means the way we learn to mother ourselves together.
It is no coincidence that this journal came yesterday in the midst of a period (surrounding Mother's Day) where J and I are struggling with how our relationships to our mothers and their challenges and our difficult memories of their frequent desperation impact each of us and our relationships to each other. It is not a coincidence that this came on a day that I was blessed to sit and talk about how/if we can remember what our grandmothers know with sisters who have been partners with me in the creation of UBUNTU arts--- a comothering process of nuturing, healing, and making space that has forever transformed me and our community and what it means to respond to sexual violence. It is no coincidence that J needed a little mothering in the minutes before the package arrived.
And indeed it is divine that the piece I wrote, a blue airmail letter between myself and my mother and grandmother, between myself and the Caribbean women writers and scholars who have made me possible, between myself and the mother daughter granddaughter characters of Dionne Brand's novel At the Full and Change of the Moon, with footnotes full of overdue shout-outs to my fellow travelers in a graduate seminar on Negritude arrived when it did . Two full years after the scheduled publication...but you know...Caribbean time stretches to dream for those of us living dispersed. It arrived in the mail after I had stopped expecting it, like many of the mother/daughter letters that inspired what I wrote.
I'm honored that my piece appears after (or anywhere near!) a poem called "Hook"
by Olive Senior (THE Olive Senior) about mother's and daughters trying to catch each other through letters and clothing and loss. It is a miracle that my work appears alongside work by Olive Senior and Pamela Mordecai and Ramabai Espinet women whose books sit on my shelf, who I studied for my prelim exams who make me cry and think about everything differently when I hear them read outloud. I am honored for my words to sit beside theirs. Women who have been helping me mother myself even if they don't know it. I am honored that the women who create and recreate the Association of Caribbean Women Writers and Scholars (the only academic association that actually feels like home) were generous enough to give my words space, and to insist that my thoughts about diaspora and gender were important and useful to them...those women who given me critical definitions and terms to use, those women whose academic and creative work has reminded me that we exist. Women who have been helping me mother myself intentionally and with love and grace. Women who are always right on time, regardless.
And it is no coincidence that you are reading this on a blog that is made worthwhile for me by the reading eyes and open hearts of everyone, but especially radical womyn of color, comothers with me in a transformed world. Gratitude overflowing.

Thank the Lorde for comothering and the possibility of being reborn together. (And thank you!)

Check out the journal here: http://www.macomerejournal.com/issues/008.html

love,
lex

Freedom Dreams: Today is Blog About Palestine Day

This week thanks to some precious advice from Fallon Wilson I have started remembering and recording my dreams.

This is a scene from a dream I remembered on Monday morning:

"and then i met a dark man with a beard. committed to defending the olive trees to the death. but he told me, unashamed, that he would never harm the woman i named, even if she ate every olive."

This affirms what I already know. A free Palestine is an imperative in my life time. The occupation that outlived June Jordan will not survive us. Period.

I think this dream was probably also influenced by what a learned at a progressive and belated passover sader that I was able to attend a couple of weeks ago...which was some insight into the profound impact of the Isreali uprooting of olive trees in Palestine. A friend explained to me that there is no equivalent that explains how important the olive trees and the olives themselves are to the survival, culture, heritage and well being and sustainability of the Palestinian people. I now understand that the uprooting of these olive trees is a violence against the earth and a deep harm to humanity. I remember that I learned to read in Spanish against the backdrop of Lorca's screams about arboles de aceituna. I remember that olive trees are one of the major metaphors in the bible, a teaching tool about what heritage is, about how our actions impact generations. Maybe I should go back and read those parts.

Maybe I was the dark bearded man in the dream. He was ready to die. I think he was ready to kill too. But I asked him about a particular woman (i don't know or remember who) and he said even she ate every olive he would do no violence.

There is something for me to learn here about the relationship between the fruit and the roots. I am being reminded that there is a difference between the cause and the manifestation of violence. I am being reminded to be radical. I am being reminded to go for the root. I am being reminded that there is a place for forgiveness in militancy. I am being reminded that our sustainability is worth more than our individual lives.

I am being reminded to grow.

I am free when Palestine is

love,
lex

There is Such a Thing as Growth

or because this made me cry.


Vita's Garden
by K Shalini

http://www.thedoorpost.com/?film=5687a4a5d7688f30a41c08565a23d5b2


Shalini also has another film about the importance of water:
A Drop of Life
http://www.adropoflife.tv/

And for anyone who hasn't seen OUR garden: www.ubuntugrows.blogspot.com
gardening meeting Wednesday 8:30 on Lex and J's porch!

"This Instant and This Triumph": Women of Color Publishing

Announcing:American Book Review, Volume 29 Number 4 with a focus on Women of Color Publishing

Top 10 Reasons to get a copy of American Book Review (just this once!)

1. Audre Lorde's face is on the cover of American Book Review. Enough said.

2. "This Instant and This Triumph" an introductory essay that puts the current women of color publishing movement into historical context by Alexis Pauline Gumbs

3. Profiles of some of the amazing publishing initiatives that women of color are popping off RIGHT NOW!

4. Ernest Hardy's exciting new release from RedBone Press (BloodBeats Vol. 2 The Bootleg Joints) reviewed by the brilliant collar popping scholar ALISHA GAINES!

5. Asha Bandele's contemporary classic The Subtle Art of Breathing reviewed by the inspiring womanist performance diva EBONY GOLDEN!

6. INCITE: Women of Color Against Violence's crucial The Revolution Will Not Be Funded reviewed by the strategically fly organizer PAULINA HERNANDEZ!

7. Girlchild Press's new anthology Just Like A Girl: A Manifesta reviewed by the most talented and necessary fiction writer of our generation DANIELLE EVANS!

8. Hermana Resist's collaborative 'zine The MAIZ Chronicles reviewed by BROWNFEMIPOWER!

9. UBUNTU/BrokenBeautiful Press's interactive anthology Wrong is Not My Name reviewed by the textually incisive KINOHI NISHIKAWA!

10. A bunch of headlines that the guest editor DID NOT APPROVE, but finds amusing nonetheless.

Check it: www.americanbookreview.org

Grace Lee Boggs: The Next American Revolution

shared by zapagringo.blogspot.com

The Next American Revolution

By Grace Lee Boggs
Left Forum Closing Plenary, Cooper Union, New York
March 16, 2008

I have decided to talk about the next American Revolution because I believe it is not only the key to global survival but also the most important step we can take in this period to build a new, more human and more socially and ecologically responsible nation that all of us, in every walk of life, whatever our race, ethnicity, gender, faith or national origin, will be proud to call our own.

I also feel that it would be a shame if we left this historic gathering in this Great Hall, at this pivotal time in our country’s history – when the power structure is obviously unable to resolve the twin crises of global wars and global warming, when millions are losing their jobs and homes, when Obama’s call for change is energizing so many young people and independents, and when white workers in Ohio, Michigan and Pennsylvania are reacting like victims — without discussing the next American revolution.

Since it is hard to struggle for something which you haven’t struggled to define and name, my aim this evening, quite frankly, is to initiate impassioned discussions about the next American revolution everywhere, in groups, small and large.

****
I begin with some history. Forty years ago my late husband, Jimmy Boggs, and I started Conversations in Maine with our old friends and comrades, Freddy and Lyman Paine, to explore how a revolution in our time in our country would differ from the many revolutions that took place around the world in the early and mid-20th century.

We four had been members of the Johnson-Forest Tendency, a tiny group inside the Workers Party and the Socialist Workers Party, led by C.L.R. James and Raya Dunayevskaya. Lyman, an architect, and Freddy, a worker and organizer, had been in the radical movement since the 1930s. Jimmy, an African American born and raised in the deep agricultural South, had worked on the line at Chrysler for 28 years and was a labor and community activist and writer. I was an Asian American intellectual who had been inspired by the 1941 March on Washington movement to become a movement activist, and after spending ten years in New York studying Marx and Lenin with CLR and Raya, had moved to Detroit in 1953, married Jimmy Boggs and became involved in the struggles organically developing in the Detroit community.

Our mantra in the Johnson-Forest Tendency had been the famous paragraph in Capital where Marx celebrates “the revolt of the working class always increasing in numbers and united, organized and disciplined by the very mechanism of the process of capitalist production.” In the early 60s when the working class was decreasing rather than increasing under the impact of what we then called “automation,” we separated from CLR when he opposed our decision to rethink Marxism.

Our separation freed us to recognize unequivocally that we were coming to the end of the relatively short industrial epoch on which Marx’s epic analysis had been based. We could see clearly that the United States was in the process of transitioning to a new mode of production, based on new informational technologies, and that this transitioning was not only epoch-ending but epoch-opening, with cultural and political ramifications as far-reaching as those involved in the transition from Hunting and Gathering to Agriculture or from Agriculture to Industry.

As movement activists and theoreticians in the tumultuous year of 1968, we were also acutely conscious that in the wake of the civil rights movement, beginning with the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in 1962, and the exploding anti-Vietnam war and women’s movements, new and more profound questions of our relationships with one another, with Nature, and with other countries were being raised with a centrality unthinkable in earlier revolutions.

Hence, as our conversations continued, we became increasingly convinced that our revolution in our country in the late 20th century had to be radically different from the revolutions that had taken place in pre-or-non-industrialized countries like Russia, Cuba, China or Vietnam. Those revolutions had been made not only to correct injustices but to achieve rapid economic growth. By contrast, as citizens of a nation which had achieved its rapid economic growth and prosperity at the expense of African Americans, Native Americans, other people of color, and peoples all over the world, our priority had to be correcting the injustices and backwardness of our relationships with one another, with other countries and with the Earth.

In other words, our revolution had to be for the purpose of accelerating our evolution to a higher plateau of humanity. That’s why we called our philosophy “Dialectical Humanism” as contrasted with the “Dialectical Materialism” of Marxism.

Six years later the practical implications of this somewhat abstract concept of an American revolution were spelled out by Jimmy in the chapter entitled “ Dialectics and Revolution” in Revolution and Evolution in the 20th Century (Monthly Review Press, 1974).

“The revolution to be made in the United States,” Jimmy wrote, nearly 30 years before 9/11, “will be the first revolution in history to require the masses to make material sacrifices rather than to acquire more material things. We must give up many of the things which this country has enjoyed at the expense of damning over one third of the world into a state of underdevelopment, ignorance, disease and early death.” Until that takes place, “this country will not be safe for the world and revolutionary warfare on an international scale against the United States will remain the wave of the present.”

“It is obviously going to take a tremendous transformation to prepare the people of the United States for these new social goals.” Jimmy continued. “But potential revolutionaries can only become true revolutionaries if they take the side of those who believe that humanity can be transformed.” Thus, the American revolution, at this stage in our history and in the evolution of technology and of the human race, is not about Jobs or health insurance or making it possible for more people to realize the American Dream of upward mobility. It is about acknowledging that we Americans enjoy middle class comforts at the expense of other peoples all over the world. It is about living the kind of lives that will end the galloping inequality both inside this country and between the Global North and the Global South, and also slow down global warming. It is about creating a new American Dream whose goal is a higher humanity instead of the higher standard of living which is dependent upon Empire. About practicing a new more active, global and participatory concept of citizenship. About becoming the change we want to see in the world.

The courage, commitment and strategies required for this kind of revolution are very different from those required to storm the Kremlin or the White House. Instead of viewing the American people as masses to be mobilized in increasingly aggressive struggles for higher wages, better jobs or guaranteed health care, we must have the courage to challenge them and ourselves to engage in activities that build a new and better world by improving the physical, psychological, political and spiritual health of ourselves, our families, our communities, our cities, our world and our planet.

This means that it is not enough to organize mobilizations calling on Congress and the President to end the war in Iraq. We must also challenge the American people to examine why 9/11 happened and why so many people around the world who, while not supporting the terrorists, understand that they were driven to these acts by anger at the U.S. role in the world, e.g. supporting the Israeli occupation of Palestine, overthrowing or seeking to overthrow democratically-elected governments, and treating whole countries, the world’s peoples and Nature only as a resource enabling us to maintain our middle class way of life.

We have to help the American people find the moral strength to recognize that, although no amount of money can compensate for the countless deaths and indescribable suffering that our criminal invasion and occupation have caused the Iraqi people, we, the American people, have a responsibility to make the material sacrifices that will help them rebuild their infrastructure. We have to help the American people grow their souls (which is not a noun but a verb) enough to recognize that since we, who are only 4% of the world’s population, have been consuming 25% of the planet’s resources, we are the ones who must take the first big steps to reduce greenhouse emissions. We are the ones who must live more simply so that others can simply live.

Moreover, we need to begin creating ways to live more frugally and cooperatively NOW because as times get harder, we “good Americans,” if we view ourselves only as victims, can easily slip into scapegoating the “other” and goose-stepping behind a nationalist leader, as the “good Germans” did in the 1930s, with Hitler.

This vision of an American revolution as transformation is the one projected by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in his April 4, 1967 anti-Vietnam war speech. As Vincent Harding, Martin’s close friend and colleague, put it recently on Democracy Now, King was calling on us to redeem the soul of America. Speaking for the weak, the poor, the despairing and the alienated, in our inner cities and in the rice paddies of Vietnam, he was urging us to become a more mature people by making a radical revolution not only against racism but against materialism and militarism. He was challenging us to “rededicate ourselves to the long and bitter, but beautiful, struggle for a new world.”

King was assassinated before he could devise concrete ways to move us towards this radical revolution of values. But why haven’t we who think of ourselves as American radicals picked up the torch? Is it because a radical revolution of values against racism, militarism and materialism is beyond our imaginations, even though we are citizens of a nation with 700 military bases whose unbridled consumerism imperil the planet?

***
In Detroit we are engaged in this “long and beautiful struggle for a new world,” not because of King’s influence (we identified more with Malcolm) but because we have learned through our own experience that just changing the color of those in political power was not enough to stem the devastation of our city resulting from deindustrialization.

I don’t have time this evening to tell you the story of our Detroit-City of Hope campaign. We hosted a panel about it yesterday morning and you can read about it in the Boggs Center broadsheet.

Our campaign involves rebuilding, redefining and respiriting Detroit from the ground up: growing food on abandoned lots, reinventing education to include children in community-building, creating co-operatives to produce local goods for local needs, developing Peace Zones to transform our relationships with one another in our homes and on our streets, replacing punitive justice with Restorative Justice programs to keep non-violent offenders in our communities and out of prisons that not only misspend billions much needed for roads and schools but turn minor offenders into hardened criminals.

It is a multigenerational campaign, involving the very old as well as the very young, and all the inbetweens, especially the Millennial generation, born in the late 1970s and 1980s, whose aptitude with the new communications technology empowers them to be remarkably self-inventive and multi-tasking and to connect and reconnect 24/7 with individuals near and far.

Despite the huge differences in local conditions, our Detroit-City of Hope campaign has more in common with the struggles of the Zapatistas in Chiapas than with the 1917 Russian Revolution because it involves a paradigm shift in the concept of revolution.

One way to understand the paradigm shift is by contrasting our vision of health in a revolutionary America with the health care programs offered by the Democratic presidential front-runners.

Hillary’s and Obama’s “health care” programs are really insurance programs having more to do with feeding the already monstrous medical-industrial complex than with our physical, mental and spiritual health. By contrast, once we understand that our schools are in such crisis because they were created a hundred years ago in the industrial epoch to prepare children to become cogs in the economic machine; once we recognize that our challenge in the 21st century is to engage our children from K-12 in problem-solving and community-building activities, our children and young people will become participants in caring for their own health and that of our families and communities. Eating food they’ve grown for themselves, creating and sharing information from the Net, and organizing health festivals for the community, they will not only be caring for their own health. They will be helping to heal our communities.

This kind of transformation is what the next American revolution is about. It is not a single event but a process. It involves all of us, from many different walks of life, ethnicities, national origins, sexual orientations, faiths. At the same time, based on our experiences in Detroit and the panels I attended at this weekend’s Forum, I see the Millennial generation playing a pivotal role. As Frantz Fanon put it in The Wretched of the Earth, “Each generation, coming out of obscurity, must define its mission and fulfill or betray it.”

Lest We Forget: Radical Black Feminism Defined

radical black feminist: "always disrupting in transgressive ways racist, classist, and homophobic structures with courage, resilience and risk taking."
-Dr. Beverly Guy-Sheftall

Bell.Defined. (For Sean and All of Us)

Bell. Defined.

that dark thing
sometimes golden
sometimes bright
heavy
round

breakable

that dark thing
sometimes shining
sometimes waiting
sometimes broken and rusted

that heavy something
that does it's only job
regularly
brutally clear

that invention
simple instrument
breakable
sometimes bronze
heavy like morning
jarring like wake up

that heavy open metal

that furnace fused curve
thick skirt to hide
under
that shape of birthing
as iron as chains

that heavy open metal

that alarm
that sound
that sound

that again
again
again

that thing

that deep and elevated symbol
in the middle of the town square

that
that reminds the people

what they know

time to
get up
up
get up
again

brutally clear job of waking

bell
that thing that reminds us

what time it is.


-alexis pauline gumbs
April 25th, 2008

Thank You Adrian Piper....for everything

learn about adrain piper at www.adrianpiper.com

Dear Editor:

Please don’t call me a black artist.
Please don’t call me a black philosopher.
Please don’t call me an African American artist.
Please don’t call me an African American philosopher.

Please don’t call me a woman artist.
Please don’t call me a woman philosopher.
Please don’t call me a female artist.
Please don’t call me a female philosopher.

Please don’t call me a black woman artist.
Please don’t call me a black woman philosopher.
Please don’t call me an African American woman artist.
Please don’t call me an African American woman philosopher.
Please don’t call me a black female artist.
Please don’t call me a black female philosopher.
Please don’t call me an African American female artist.
Please don’t call me an African American female philosopher.
Please don’t call me a female black artist.
Please don’t call me a female black philosopher.
Please don’t call me a female African American artist.
Please don’t call me a female African American philosopher.

Please don’t call me an artist who happens to be black.
Please don’t call me a philosopher who happens to be black.
Please don’t call me an artist who happens to be African American.
Please don’t call me a philosopher who happens to be African American.

Please don’t call me an artist who happens to be a woman.
Please don’t call me a philosopher who happens to be a woman.
Please don’t call me an artist who happens to be female.
Please don’t call me a philosopher who happens to be female.

Please don’t call me an artist who happens to be black and a woman.
Please don’t call me a philosopher who happens to be black and a woman.
Please don’t call me an artist who happens to be a woman and black.
Please don’t call me a philosopher who happens to be a woman and black.
Please don’t call me an artist who happens to be African American and a woman.
Please don’t call me a philosopher who happens to be African American and a woman.
Please don’t call me an artist who happens to be a woman and African American.
Please don’t call me a philosopher who happens to be a woman and African American.
Please don’t call me an artist who happens to be black and female.
Please don’t call me a philosopher who happens to be black and female.
Please don’t call me an artist who happens to be female and black.
Please don’t call me a philosopher who happens to be female and black.
Please don’t call me an artist who happens to be African American and female.
Please don’t call me a philosopher who happens to be African American and female.
Please don’t call me an artist who happens to be female and African American.
Please don’t call me a philosopher who happens to be female and African American.

Please don’t call me a black artist and philosopher.
Please don’t call me a black philosopher and artist.
Please don’t call me an African American artist and philosopher.
Please don’t call me an African American philosopher and artist.

Please don’t call me a woman artist and philosopher.
Please don’t call me a woman philosopher and artist.
Please don’t call me a female artist and philosopher.
Please don’t call me a female philosopher and artist.

Please don’t call me a black woman artist and philosopher.
Please don’t call me a black woman philosopher and artist.
Please don’t call me an African American woman artist and philosopher.
Please don’t call me an African American woman philosopher and artist.
Please don’t call me a black female artist and philosopher.
Please don’t call me a black female philosopher and artist.
Please don’t call me an African American female artist and philosopher.
Please don’t call me an African American female philosopher and artist.
Please don’t call me a female black artist and philosopher.
Please don’t call me a female black philosopher and artist.
Please don’t call me a female African American artist and philosopher.
Please don’t call me a female African American philosopher and artist.

Please don’t call me an artist and philosopher who happens to be black.
Please don’t call me a philosopher and artist who happens to be black.
Please don’t call me an artist and philosopher who happens to be African American.
Please don’t call me a philosopher and artist who happens to be African American.

Please don’t call me an artist and philosopher who happens to be a woman.
Please don’t call me a philosopher and artist who happens to be a woman.
Please don’t call me an artist and philosopher who happens to be female.
Please don’t call me a philosopher and artist who happens to be female.

Please don’t call me an artist and philosopher who happens to be black and a woman.
Please don’t call me a philosopher and artist who happens to be black and a woman.
Please don’t call me an artist and philosopher who happens to be a woman and black.
Please don’t call me a philosopher and artist who happens to be a woman and black.
Please don’t call me an artist and philosopher who happens to be African American and a woman.
Please don’t call me a philosopher and artist who happens to be African American and a woman.
Please don’t call me an artist and philosopher who happens to be a woman and African American.
Please don’t call me a philosopher and artist who happens to be a woman and African American.
Please don’t call me an artist and philosopher who happens to be black and female.
Please don’t call me a philosopher and artist who happens to be black and female.
Please don’t call me an artist and philosopher who happens to be female and black.
Please don’t call me a philosopher and artist who happens to be female and black.
Please don’t call me an artist and philosopher who happens to be African American and female.
Please don’t call me a philosopher and artist who happens to be African American and female.
Please don’t call me an artist and philosopher who happens to be female and African American.
Please don’t call me a philosopher and artist who happens to be female and African American.

Dear Editor,
I hope you will bring to my attention any permutations I have overlooked.
I write to inform you that
I have earned the right to be called an artist.
I have earned the right to be called a philosopher.
I have earned the right to be called an artist and philosopher.
I have earned the right to be called a philosopher and artist.
I have earned the right to call myself anything I like.

Thank you in advance for your consideration.
Adrian Piper

1 January 2003

Nana in the Garden: Taking Care of Ourselves

Joyce McKenzie, my Nana, can make anything grow. Look at me. First grandchild with the flowering hair, the undisciplinable body, granddaughter of a once undocumented immigrant (my Nana) with a migrant spirit, nomad hands and a disdain for passports. Some people know how to make anything grow. Even the most difficult, unpredictable shoots of hope we have.

This is for Nana. Nana who snuck into my room to end my cough by rubbing white rum on my chest. Nana who made me drink all kinds of things I was afraid of. "Drink it down! While it's hot!" Nana of the lemon and honey. Nana of the best soup EVER. Nana of the cornmeal porridge. Nana of the the cod-liver oil. Nana of the seven seas. Nana who reminds me every month to get a British Passport. Nana who knows why one citizenship is not enough. Nana of the golden seal. Nana who finds sweaters and wool pants in South Florida to mail North "for my little professor". Nana of the box of oranges mailed from Florida to the New York City dorm room twice a winter. Nana of the Valentine's Day cards, the Easter Cards, the it's Wednesday and I love my granddaughter cards. Nana who sent me the microwave and the rice cooker, anything to get that skinny child to eat. Some people know how to nurture even the most threatened and least cooperative green young things.

Nana is from Jamaica. Which means we are from Jamaica. None of us will never get used to frost. And since Nana lives in central Florida she rarely has to. Just last month she called incredulous about a freeze that cut short the life of her hibiscus flowers. Today she told me that she will be planting roses again. I love my hibiscus, but roses are hardy, she said. They know how to survive the winter. Everything Nana says is advice, whether she knows it or not. I need to embroider that somewhere. "They know how to survive the winter." But even though I have a sewing machine in my old school living room, near the mantle that features a picture of me as a little kid between my two grandmothers. Even though my Grandma Lydia Gumbs went to Pratt, sewed the prize winning graduation dress, and made me the most elaborate halloween costumes, my own black raggedy-ann dolls, I haven't learned how to sew yet.

And even though Nana has grown mangoes, oranges, bananas, hibiscus, roses and more in backyards from Miami to Lakeland, I haven't learned to garden yet either. If it wasn't for my partner even my bamboo would probably have withered long ago. But now...along with the womyn in the SPEAK collective and the remnants of UBUNTU the unruly, ungrounded shake in my hands is meeting the earth. It is time to take care of ourselves. My backyard (or our yard behind the house I rent) is about to become our community garden. Basil, tomatoes, lettuce, goldfish, marigolds, rainbarrels, compost, corn, cucumbers. I know nothing about any of this, but some people know how to make anything grow. Even me.

This morning Nana had surgery. A lumpectomy and for five days she will be having radiation. Yesterday Nana made her famous soup..with the dumplings in it...I'm hungry even thinking about it. My mother is in Florida with Nana doing a raw fruit and vegetable fast (which means she couldn't eat the soup either!). She is confident telling me that she will be okay. And I believe and intend that she will recover quickly. She has already promised to come boss us around here in the garden in Durham. And next month my mother is fulfilling her lifelong goal to become a doula by participating in a doula training specifically for women of color co-sponsored by SisterSong. And Mama Nayo said she'd come back to us as babies or corn. And we are alive and growing. We are taking care of ourselves.

Blessed are the gardeners. We know how to make each other grow. Hold my Nana in your thoughts.

love,
lex

p.s. this is also for Sanesha Stewart's grandmother who I was blessed to hear speak at the beautiful vigil in her honor at the Bronx Community Pride Center this weekend. Outliving our grandmothers is hard. We cannot afford to outlive our granddaughters. Hold in your thoughts a beautiful loving woman who is outliving her granddaughter now because of transphobic violence.

Nobody Can Say it Better...

Sudy posted this on her blog: http://myecdysis.blogspot.com/

about SPEAK womyn of color blogger collective's participation in this weekend's Women "Action" and the media conference:

LIVE Blogging from WAM: Say Thank You

It's not easy hosting brilliant feminist thinkers in one apartment. Adonis and I welcomed BFP, Nadia, Lex, and Jess Hoffman from Make/Shift into our humble abode and are trying to keep up with everyone's energy.

This morning, we were cutting it a bit close as I drove like a mad womyn through the crowded streets of Boston to get BFP to her 11am session. We arrived at 10:54am and I ran through the parking lot to make it in time for the opening talks. The speech BFP gave can be found on her blog. There's no way to sum up the injustices that are happening on our borders and how womyn are being abused, beated, mocked, and torn away from their children. But, the panel was really terrific and shed light on an issue that cannot be denied as a womyn's issue. Including myself in this vow, for those who ignore the violence at the border done to migrant womyn, it is erroneous to claim one is a feminist or engages in feminist discourse. These continuous infractures of human rights on US soil is a feminist issue. Period.

The Radical Womyn of Color Bloggers' Caucus had a few bumpy spots, to say the least. Our room was double booked and we got booted to another building. By the time we got settled and going, we only had 30 minutes left of a one hours session. Nonetheless, those 30 minutes were filled with question, passion, and struggle. What amazes me most about deep conversations with womyn of color is how different we are, how contrasting our opinions can be, but somehow it stays streamlined and flows with the utmost respect and understanding.

The second session was the one I originally proposed, "We B(e)lo(n)g: Womyn of Color and Online Feminism. The space that we created was filled with incredible voices and generous minds who spoke gratitude, wishes, and vision for a world of healing, belief, and justice. I wasn't sure how the session was going to go, but I know that there was one moment that I will never forget for the rest of my life.

After the session, I was catching up with Adele Nieves about her rocking book proposal for which she has worked her patooty off. A young womyn, maybe 19 or 20, stood quietly behind me and tapped me on the shoulder. I turned and recognized her fresh eyes and smile - a radiant participant in the session I just helped convene. She threw her arms around me and whispered into my ear, "Thank you. I have to go, but thank you." When I pulled back to see her face, she skittered off and left before I could ask her name.

That moment will likely fill me for many days to come. A simple, conventional gesture turned miraculous offering, an embrace of thanksgiving gave me a clarity that can only come with such a young person. What I helped create helped someone else. I don't know how, why, or to what depth. But, a stranger's embrace healed any pain I had felt that week and any anxiety I had about the presentation. I touched one.

And she thanked me.

I was left to ponder Gloria Anzaldua. This young womyn and her fierce Thank You reminded me exaclty how I felt when I read Gloria Anzaldua for the first time. I was overcome not only by her power, but what came out of me because of her honesty. I became a better human because of her work.

I'd like to think that perhaps, in a small way, I helped someone else today too.

Contigo,
Sudy

Sprung Already!: This is What Radical Love Looks Like

Note: This entire post is sparked by the video brilliance of Shannon, Sudy and Nia and the talent of my community. Please do yourself the honor of seeing Mama Nia's editing, Rachael 's voice and Mama Nayo's beautiful face on the tribute video "Nothing is Destroyed"

Another world is not only possible, it’s already here, working and growing in our communities. Can you see it? Brokenbeautiful Press is proud to announce the launch of our new community video portal “What it Look Like” featuring the radical, subversive, beautiful and challenging work of community building made visible.

“What it look like?” is a homegrown question about where we are (going). We ask “what it look like?” to begin a conversation, assess a situation and open ourselves to possibilities. This new interactive space is about the BrokenBeautiful possibility of connecting our communities, remembering what we already know how to do, and firmly forgetting the corporate media’s shuck and jive.

Click here to view the first set of videos and email brokenbeautifulpress@gmail.com to add your home-made videos, slideshows or photos of your community in action to the site.

Statement in Solidarity with Palestine

INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence endorses the following statement (and so do i!) ~~~ Given that International Women's Day coincided with the catastrophic events in Gaza, please show your solidarity by signing the statement below from the Campaign of Solidarity with Women Resisting U.S. Wars and Occupation. You can send your name, affiliation, and place of residence to: solidaritywomen@yahoo..com. Piya Chatterjee & Sunaina Maira

An Open Letter to All Feminists:

Statement of Solidarity with Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim Women

Facing War and Occupation

As feminists and people of conscience, we call for solidarity with Palestinian women in Gaza suffering due to the escalating military attacks that Israel turned into an open war on civilians. This war has targeted women and children, and all those who live under Israeli occupation in the West Bank, and are also denied the right to freedom of movement, health, and education. We stand in solidarity with Iraqi women whose daughters, sisters, brothers, or sons have been abused, tortured, and raped in U.S. prisons such as Abu Ghraib. Women in Iraq continue to live under a U.S. occupation that has devastated families and homes, and are experiencing a rise in religious extremism and restrictions on their freedom that were unheard of before the U.S. invasion, "Operation Iraqi Freedom," in 2003. At this moment in Afghanistan, women are living with the return of the Taliban and other misogynistic groups such as the Northern Alliance, a U.S. ally, and with the violence of continuing U.S. and NATO attacks on civilians, despite the U.S. war to "liberate" Afghan women in 2001. As of March 6, 2008, over 120 Palestinians, including 39 children and 6 women (more than a third of the victims), in Gaza were killed by Israeli air strikes and escalated attacks on civilians over a period of five days, according to human rights groups.[1] Hospitals have been struggling to treat 370 injured children, as reported by medical officials. Homes have been destroyed as well as civilian facilities including the headquarters of the General Federation of Palestinian Trade Unions.[2] On February 29, 2008, Israel's Deputy Defense Minister, Matan Valnai, threatened Palestinians in Gaza with a "bigger Shoah," the Hebrew word usually used only for the Holocaust.[3] What does it mean that the international community is standing by while this is happening? Valnai's threat of a Holocaust against Palestinians was not just a slip of the tongue, for the war on Gaza is a continuation of genocidal activities against the indigenous population. Israel has controlled the land and sea borders and airspace of Gaza for more than a year and a half, confining 1.5 million Palestinians to a giant prison. Supported by the U.S., Israel has imposed a near total blockade on Gaza since June 2007 which has led to a breakdown in basic services, including water and sanitation, lack of electricity, fuel, and medical supplies. As a result of these sanctions, 30% of children under 5 years suffer from stunted growth and malnutrition. Over 80% of the population cannot afford a balanced meal.[4] Is this humanitarian crisis going to approach a situation similar to that of the sanctions against Iraq from 1991-2003, when an estimated 500,000 Iraqi children died to lack of nutrition and medical supplies, and the woman who was then Secretary of State, Madeline Albright, proclaimed that the death of a half million Iraqi children was worth the price of U.S. national security? As feminists and anti-imperialist people of conscience, we oppose direct and indirect policies of ethnic cleansing and decimation of native populations by all nation-states. In the current climate of U.S.-initiated or U.S.-backed assaults on women in Palestine, Iraq, and Afghanistan, we are deeply troubled by one kind of hypocritical Western feminist discourse that continues to be preoccupied with particular kinds of violence against Muslim or Middle Eastern women, while choosing to remain silent on the lethal violence inflicted on women and families by military occupation, F-16s, Apache helicopters, and missiles paid for by U.S. tax payers. This is a moment when U.S. imperialism brazenly uses direct colonial occupation, masked in a civilizational discourse of bringing Western "freedom" and "democracy." Such acts echo the language of Manifest Destiny that was used to justify U.S. colonization of the Philippines and Pacific territories in the 19^th century, not to mention the genocide of Native Americans. U.S. covert, and not so covert, interventions in Central, South America, Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean have devastated the lives of countless indigenous peoples, and other civilians, in this region throughout the 20^th century. The U.S., as well its proxy militias or client regimes, has inflicted violence on women and girls from Vietnam, Okinawa, and Pakistan to Chile, El Salvador, and Somalia and has avenged the deaths of its soldiers by its own "honor killings" that lay siege to entire towns, such as Fallujah in Iraq. It is appalling that in these catastrophic times, many U.S. liberal feminists are focused only on misogynistic practices associated with particular local cultures, as if these exist in capsules, far from the arena of imperial occupation. Indeed, imperial violence has given fuel to some of these patriarchal practices of misogyny and sexism. They should also know that such a narrow vision furthers a much older tradition of feminist mobilizing in the service of colonialism—"saving brown, or black women, from brown men," as observed by Gayatri Spivak. While we too oppose abuses including domestic violence, "honor killings," forced marriage, and brutal punishment, we are disturbed that some U.S. feminists—as well as Muslim or Middle Eastern women who claim to be "authorities" on Islam and are employed by right-wing think tanks—are participating in a selective discourse of universal women's rights that ignores U.S. war crimes and abuses of human rights. While some progressive U.S. feminists claim to oppose the hijacking of women's rights to justify U.S. invasions, they simultaneously evade any mention about the plight of women in Palestine, Iraq, or Afghanistan. Their statements continue to focus only on female genital mutilation or dowry deaths under the guise of breaking the "politically correct" silence on abuses of women in the "Muslim world" that the Right disingenuously laments.[5] Some progressives may support such statements with good intentions, but these critiques ignore the fact that Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim feminists have been working on these issues for generations, focusing on the intersections of gender, sexuality, race, class, and nationalism. Their work is ignored by North American feminists who claim to advocate for a "global sisterhood" but are disillusioned to discover that women in the U.S. military participated in the acts of torture at Abu Ghraib. We are concerned about these silences and selective condemnations given that the U.S. mainstream media bolsters this imperialist feminism by using an (often liberal) Orientalist approach to covering the Middle East or South Asia. For example, on March 5, 2008, as the death toll due to Israeli attacks in Gaza was mounting, the New York Times chose to publish an article just below its report on the Israeli military incursions that focused on the sentencing of a Palestinian man in Israel for an honor killing; the report was deemed worthy of international coverage because the Palestinian women had broken "the code of silence" by resorting to Israeli courts.[6] The implications of this juxtaposition of two unrelated events are that Palestinians belong to a backward, patriarchal culture that, rightly or wrongly, is under attack by a modern, "democratic" state with a legal apparatus that supports women's rights. Others have shown that the New York Times gave disproportionate attention to the Human Rights Watch report in 2006 on domestic violence against Palestinian women relative to its scant mention of the 76 reports of Israeli abuses of Palestinian rights by Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and the Israeli organization, B'Tselem.[7] Similar coverage exists of women from other countries outside the U.S. that are portrayed as victims only of their own cultural traditions, rather than also of the ravages of Western imperialism and predatory global capitalism. No attention is paid in the mainstream U.S. media to reports such as that in Haaretz documenting that Palestinian women citizens of Israel are the most exploited group in the Israeli workforce, making only 47% of the wages earned by their Jewish counterparts in Israel, and with double the rate of unemployment of Jewish women.[8] Little is known in the U.S. about what the lives of Iraqi women are really like now that they are pressured to cover themselves in public or not work outside the house, nor of Afghani women whose homes are still being bombed in a war that was supposed to have liberated them many years ago. We stand in solidarity with feminist and liberatory movements that are opposing U.S. imperialism, U.S.-backed occupation, militarism, and economic exploitation as well as resisting religious and secular fundamentalisms. We also support the struggles of those within the U.S. opposing the War on Terror and racist practices of detention, deportation, surveillance, and torture linked to the military-industrial-prison complex that selectively targets immigrants, minorities, and youth of color. We are grateful for the courageous scholarship of academics who are at risk of not getting tenure or employment because they do research related to settler colonialism or taboo topics such as Palestinian rights and expose controversial aspects of U.S. policies here and abroad. At a moment when U.S. military interventions have made "democracy" a dirty word in much of the world, we strive for true democracy and for freedom and justice for all our sisters and brothers. Piya Chatterjee, University of California-Riverside Sunaina Maira, University of California-Davis Campaign of Solidarity with Women Resisting U.S. Wars and Occupation South Asians for the Liberation of Falastin

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[1] "The Tragedy in Gaza," Kinder USA, www.kinderusa.org. March 5, 2008. [2] Weekly Report on Israeli Human Rights Violations in the Occupied Palestinian Territory: "Wide-Scale Israeli Military Operations Against the Gaza Strip." Palestinian Centre for Human Rights, http://www.pchrgaza.org. March 6, 2008. [3] Rory McCarthy, "Israeli Minister Warns of Holocaust for Gaza if Violence Continues." The Guardian, March 1, 2008. www.guardian.co.uk. [4] "The Tragedy in Gaza." [5] For example, Katha Pollitt's petition, "An Open Letter from American Feminists," posted at: http://www.motherjones.com/mojoblog/archives/2008/01/6901_an_open_letter.html. See also: Debra Dickerson, "What NOW? Feminist Fatigue and the Global Quest for Women's Rights," Mother Jones. www.MotherJones_com.News.mht [6] "16-Year Sentence in Honor Killing," The New York Times, March 5, 2008. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/05/world/middleeast/05honor.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=Honor+Killing+March+5%2C+2008&st=nyt&oref=slogin. [7] Patrick O'Connor and Rachel Roberts, "The New York Times Marginalizes Palestinian Women and Palestinian Rights." November 7, 2006. [8] Ruth Sinai, "Arab Women – the Most Exploited Group in Israeli Workforce." Haaretz, January 2, 2008. www.haaretz.com.