Bright New Day
A CyberQuilting ExperimentJust Saying/ See You There: Love Languages for Collaboration
Yesterday was our third Eye to Eye Webinar session on love, faith, difference and communication entitled “The Only Language I Know.” We shared our poetic clarity about how we communicate differently based on our experiences, our approaches, our fears and our longings and how sometimes words seem to fail us all together. Our group poem represents our visioning process of creating a space where there is room for everyone we are, and who we are not, and who we might become together.
Just Saying/See You There
By the Brilliance Remastered Eye to Eye Participants
After Audre Lorde’s “At First I Thought You Were Talking About…”
I speak the language of roots up, all the way everything must be changed.
She speaks the language of measurable deliverables.
I speak the language of rainwater-clarification-process-matters.
They speak jampack big words together like a train
I speak the language of here right here at home.
He speaks the language of inevitable uprise class struggle like science.
I speak in things felt a knowing of my bones
He through well thought out equations elaborate logic models
I speak in hope
Him pragmatism
I speak “like me”
She speaks I like you, but not always
She speaks me first. She speaks my kids first. She speaks secrets
I speak 69 years. He speaks FaceBook
I speak plan with flexibility.
They speak plan and stick to it.
I speak student wants and needs
They speak stick to what we need to see only
I speak possible risky let’s do it
they speak practical hedged bet sacrifice
I speak concepts & ideas are real, they are tangible, touchable.
They speak “huh, what you what you talking bout sistah?”
I speak seek the relationship
They speak: seek the product(s)
I speak the language of the academy sometimes
he speaks shyness, grammar of booze and sex
sometimes I speak no grammar language
But I know that:
“Black girls are from the future”[1] and that
“Everything we do is insignificant. Yet it is incredibly
important that we do it.” [2] And that
Children are full people who have something to say
And that trusting is like tree roots and we reach down, tangled up
And that everything we need is already within us
And that I am who I am doing what I came to do
And that our silence will NOT save us.
SO I am seeking the place where the language of risky radicalism
meets the pragmatism of those who have seen the consequences
the place where afrofuturefearlessness meets blackbloodsoilhistory
the place where we feel whole meets
the place where we are allowed to be prisms of light
the place where faith meets shaking legs
the place where level headed realists can meet starry eyed dreamers
the place where good intentions meet critical implementation
the place where longing meets listening
the place where yes meets i know
the place where why meets when
the place where–as white people–we remember without expectation of forgiveness
we account for what has been lost and stolen
the place where but i have _______ friends, so I couldn’t be __________
meets self introspection
the place where bourgie balancing meets grace
where press and curl meets this is my natural curl
the place where longing children meet absent parents
the place where wholeness meets brokenness
where miracles equal a mere embrace
the place where courage (like jumping into a cold river)
meets self-determination (where are the rocks at the bottom)
the place where the long night meets the pale kiss of morning
the place where water and sky are indistinguishable
the place how i was raised meets raise UP!
the place where can’t get right GETS RIGHT
the place where hope meets salvation
where the souls of the living dance hot and fast in love, light
and treating each other right
the place where the love you always wanted meets the love you always had
See you there.
Be Like: A Poetic Vision of Collaboration
Yesterday was the second session of the Brilliance Remastered Eye to Eye Webinar on Radical Collaboration for Community Accountable Scholars.
We talked about what is at stake our collaborations, nothing less than the world we want to live in and create together. We supported each other in holding ourselves to a standard where our collaborations themselves embody the values we have for our future, and where the impact of that collaborative work on US is not sacrificial, but also consistent with the nourishing vision we have for our species on the planet.
We made ourselves poets with this similie standard for what our collaborations can feel like, what our futures can feel like, what our days right now can feel like.
Be Like: A Poetic Vision for Collaboration
by the participants of the Eye to Eye Webinar on Radical Collaboration for Community Accountable Scholars
like breathing, like recognition, like gratitude
like manna from heaven, free and plentiful for all
like eye contact, like risky breath, like skin
like ease, like willingness, like welcoming
like food on the table, like real justice for all, like freedom
like deep earthy soul bearing funky togetherness
like sisters I never had, like a family we are making everyday
like the joy of decoding a secret language
like celebration, like faces touching, like cherished communion and congratulation
like everyday cheer for your graduation from another insight-filled day of being you
like a shower, refreshed remembrance that I don’t have to be everyone
like a rub on the back looking at me eye to eye
like face to face, foreheads pressed in affirmation
like life sustained, like clean water, like no more premature deaths
like being excited and grateful you exist
like love, like love, like loving
like coming home at last
Black Feminist Film School (The Website) is Born!
Spring is thoroughly SPRUNG and collaborators Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Ph.D. and Julia Roxanne Wallace, M.Div. are proud to present their newest dream come true: Black Feminist Film School!!!
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Read our founding document Create Anew: Black Feminist Filmmaking as Spiritual Leadership by Julia Roxanne Wallace!
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Read about our first superstar public event on Black Feminist Filmmaking featuring the early works of Cheryl Dunye and the brilliance of Yvonne Welbon, Katina Parker and Julia Roxanne Wallace here: http://blackfeministfilmschool.wordpress.com/events/
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Check out our first Black Feminist Film forum on Camille Billops and Suzanne Suzanne with reflections by Kai Green, Julia Wallace and Alexis Pauline Gumbs here: http://blackfeministfilmschool.wordpress.com/films-filmmakers/#reflectionssuzanne
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How can you get involved?
1. Email mobilehomecoming@gmail.com to get on our Black Feminist Film School update list so you can get notices about our screenings and workshops!
2. Save the date August 15-22 to come to Durham, North Carolina for our first experimental, healing, ancestor accountable exercise in performance and documentation as part of Queer Black August in Durham! (email mobilehomecoming@gmail.com to get updates about Queer Black August specifically)
3. Contribute! Do you have a rare Black feminist film to send to our library? Are you a Black feminist filmmaker that wants to donate a film or speak at a screening? 
Do you just love the project and want to donate money towards this crucial and long overdue manifestation of brilliance? Email us at mobilehomecoming@gmail.com or donate here:
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About Black Feminist Film School
Born out of our frustration with the glaring exclusion of films and discourse by, about or for Black women in Julia’s film school experience and our deep love for the possibility of Black feminism in all forms, Black Feminist Film School is a collaboration between Black feminist scholar/filmmaker Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Ph.D and Black feminist filmmaker/scholar Julia Roxanne Wallace, M.Div.
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Our project has 2 key components:
1. Is there Black feminist tradition in film? Make space for a discourse about Black feminism in film and a conceptual framework in which contemporary filmmakers and theorists of film can participate in, measure, look out for and/or critique the presence or possibility of Black feminism specifically in the medium of film/video by
- screenings and discussions of rare/underdistributed films by Black women directors/writer/producers in our hometown of Durham, North Carolina and around the country.
- online forums on this site by Black feminist scholars about the possibility of Black feminism in important films by Black women
- sharing information about the locations of rare/hard to see films by Black feminist filmmakers
- developing a curriculum on Black feminist film, piloted in a community setting
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2. Where my Black feminist filmmakers at? Infuse Black feminist community, and in particular under-represent Black women and genderqueer filmmakers and future filmmakers with the skills to use film to express their visions and transform our society by:
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- hosting a series of accessible community workshops that share the skills of script-writing, producing, shooting, lighting, editing, sound and all the other skills crucial to making high quality films
- creating partnerships between existing institutions/equipment sources and potential Black feminist filmmakers
- building community between existing Black feminist filmmakers, with an emphasis on queer and genderqueer Black filmmakers
- creating an all queer of color and allied cast and crew for Julia’s upcoming film!
Not Meant to Be Alone: Towards Collaboration
Yesterday was the first session of the webinar Eye to Eye: Radical Collaboration for Community Accountable Scholars! We gathered to talk about my VERY favorite essay by Audre Lorde and how we can create the collaborations we dream of beyond the individualism, tokenization and internalized oppression that often gets in the way of the collaborations we most urgently need and deeply want! Our first group poem comes from a line from Carson McCuller’s The Heart is a Lonely Hunter appropriated by Barbara and Beverly Smith as the title of their collection of letters between Black Feminists in Conditions 4 and then again by Audre Lorde in Eye to Eye: “I am not meant to be alone and without you who understand.” This longing to end isolation, to build community and to be seen and understood in the context of our vision is the grounding desire (aka LOVE) that inspires our collaborations. Name your longing! Who and what are you meant to be with in this life?
Not Meant to Be Alone (A Poem for you Who May Understand)
created by the participants in the Eye to Eye Webinar on Radical Collaboration for Community Accountable Scholars
I am not meant to be alone and without the love of black women bourgie, broke, booklearned, backbreaking or otherwise.
I am not meant to be alone and without black men at the age the prison eats up in my life, at my table and on my team
I am not meant to be alone without those who try to answer my intellectual and spiritual questions
I am not meant to be alone and without someone to call to say silly black feminist nonsense to
I am not meant to be alone and without my reflection: black women educators…
I am not meant to be alone and without my family created & given
I am not meant to be alone and without the listening of my family even when my ideas are radical and dangerous
I am not meant to be alone and without my mama
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I am not meant to be alone and without inspiration
I am not meant to be alone and without warmth, roots, the world
I am not meant to be alone and without purpose
I am not meant to be alone and without books
I am not meant to be alone and without good poetry
I am not meant to be alone and without a good party
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I am meant to be here
I am meant to be with of each of you
I am meant to be with more rad women of color
I am meant to be with my ancestors and yours!
I am meant to be with the love, support & freedom of my beloved communities despite our differences
I am meant to be at home, but able to have conversations with the rest of the world too
I am meant to be in different forms of schooling/learning spaces other than the academy
I am meant to be a supporter of friends and family
I meant to do work that is community accountable
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I am meant to be with my closeted cousins in the Caribbean who are scared because I am loud
I am meant to be with those hurt by organized religion learning again their undeniable worth
I am meant to be with those who choose stability, without judgment but with open quit-your-job-invitation arms
I am meant to be with people of color who have been battered by the academy but who can learn to love themselves and each other again
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I am meant to be with those seeking to practice freedom
I am meant to be with clean water and good food
I am meant to be with peace of mind
I am meant to be with deep loving conversations with strangers
I am meant to nurture and be nurtured by people who carry similar visions
I am meant to be with my own superpowers, awake and necessary
I am meant to be with you.
Daily Truth: Mantras for Remastering the Day
In the middle of the fourth and final session (it’s so hard to say goodbye) of the Remastered Tools 101 Webinar, we affirmed the fact that daily truth is a crucial tool for empowered community accountable intellectual work. In order to stay in each other’s lives every day beyond the webinar we shared the daily mantras that remind us WHAT IT REALLY IS! We will be putting these affirmations in our homes, pockets, bags, offices so that we can see them everyday and we invite you to do the same!
Remastered Tools 101: Daily Mantras:
“you here to remind people of free” -marvin k white
“I am who I am doing what I came to do.” –Audre Lorde
“Being open to receiving and giving blessings will keep you in touch with your passion, the passion you need to make it to the finish line. Get excited about your work and know that when you change the way you look at things, things you look at change. Go get em’ girl. I wish I could show you, when you are lonely or in darkness, the astonishing light of your being.” –Melissa’s Auntie
“Nothing in the world is as soft and yielding as water, yet for dissolving the hard and inflexible nothing can surpass it.” –Tao Te Ching
“I wish to live because life has within it that which is good, that which is beautiful and that which is love.” Lorraine Hansberry
“Salt water can heal anything.” Lex’s Pop-pop
“Go on and be what we couldn’t.” Mississippi Damned
“We can learn to mother ourselves.” Audre Lorde
“How you treat yourself if how you treat God. You are the representation of God in your life.”
“When I let go of what I am, I become what I might be.” Lao Tzu
“Are you sure, sweetheart, that you want to be well.” Minnie Ransom from Toni Cade Bambara’s The Salt Eaters
“Consistency is manifestation.“ Queen Hollins
“There is an invisible red threat that connects all human beings and though it may stretch or tangle it will never break.” Chinese Proverb
“Love is lifeforce.” June Jordan
“A thing is mighty big when time and distance cannot shrink it.” –Zora Neale Hurston
“There is a close connection between sexual repression and extreme aggression.”
“This is my granddaughter the poet.” Lex’s Grandma
“Caminante, no hay puentes, se hace puentes, se hace puentes al andar./ Voyager, there are no bridges, one builds them as one walks.” –Gloria Anzaldua
“Listen to each person as if she is your great teacher uttering her last words.”-Hafiz
“Safety is always necessarily an illusion.” –James Baldwin
“The work is the diva.” Zakia
“The best way to do it is to do it!” Toni Cade Bambara
“Everything in the universe is within you. Ask all from yourself.” Rumi
“Movement is medicine.” Brown Femi Power
“Relationships not resumes.” –Thaura Distro
“Wrong is not my name. My name is my own my own my own my own.” –June Jordan
“We have the opportunity and the responsibility to become fifty times greater than we thought we could be.” Grace Lee Boggs and James Boggs
“We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous. Actually, who are you not to be?” Marianne Williams
“Warrior get up!” Climbing Poetree
“So it is better to speak, remembering we were never meant to survive.” Audre Lorde
“Black girls are from the future.” Renina Jarmon
Remastered Tools 101 Webinar: Applications due March 1
The Remastered Tools 101 Webinar is a month-long course for visionary under-represented graduate students and emerging community accountable scholars inspired by the brilliance of Audre Lorde. See alexispauline.com/
Remastered Tools 101 is an opportunity to examine our relationship to knowledge and our theories of change as they relate to the work we do as scholars and the work we empower with our scholarship. We will investigate how dependence on systems that are NOT community accountable are cultivated even in the most seemingly radical fields and support each other in creating visions for our own community accountability.
Remastered Tools will run on Wednesday evenings March 7-28
Required Reading: Audre Lorde’s The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House
The Remastered Tools 101 Webinar includes:
- a workbook based on Audre Lorde’s The Master’s Tools
- 4 live webinar discussion sessions facilitated by Alexis Pauline Gumbs and attended by aligned visionary underrepresented scholars
- inclusion in an ongoing networking google-group for webinar graduates
- group theme songs to rock to while you smash the system
Rate: $25-50 per participant per session ($100-200 for the whole course) or FREE for one-on-one coaching clients.
To apply for the Remastered Tools 101 Webinar email brillianceremastered@gmail.com with your responses to the following questions:
Contact information: (phone, email)
Who are you and what are you up to?
Why do you want to take this webinar?
Brilliance Remastered: For Visionary Community Accountable Scholars and Grad Students!
Calling all community accountable scholars and visionary under-represented grad students!
Hey there bright thunder!
Do you ever feel isolated and misunderstood in your department? Do you ever feel that the passions that motivated you to get your degree are contradicted more and more by the process of getting there? Do you feel like you are in limbo? That even the well-meaning advisors around you know how to help you conform to academic standards, but can’t be accountable to the ways you want to TRANSFORM?
Never fear. You are not alone. As Audre Lorde famously said to an academic conference filled with feminist scholars: “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” But less people remember that immediately afterwards she reminded us that “This fact is only threatening to those who still define the master’s house as their only source of support.”
Brilliance Remastered is about going beyond our critique of the master’s tools in order to cultivate the already existing tangible forms of support that can free us up to do the brilliant work we were born to do inside the academy and beyond it.
I had the miraculous experience of a wildly successful and enjoyable experience in graduate school. I wrote, published, traveled, presented, finished in a very timely manner and was even offered some exciting and attractive tenure track jobs. At the same time built an ecology of community institutions and autonomous community accountable intellectual projects that allowed me to freely choose to do my passionate work in the ways that would best serve my community and my vision for a transformed planet beyond the scarcity model of academic self-marketing.
I found that the key to a miraculous experience of community accountable scholarship was
- constantly being in touch with the deeper purpose of my intellectual work
- remaining connected and accountable to the communities that I love
Brilliance Remastered is my contribution to shifting the paradigm of what we do as community accountable scholars. It is my intention that your experience of graduate school is not full of paranoia, proving yourself, being misunderstood and overlooked, but rather of radiant and inspiring opportunities to bring your best intellectual resources to the issues and communities you care about. I also intend that when you finish graduate school you are not grabbing for crumbs based on what academic institution wants to hire and tokenize and overwork an under-represented person with your specialties, but rather that you will be able to choose to continue your passionate inquiry on your own terms in ways that prioritize and support strategies of power for the communities you love.
Brilliance Remastered is a wellspring for remembering that as Audre Lorde said, the master’s house is not our only form of support. As community, we are our primary and most valuable sources of support. Browse our webinars, one-on-one coaching offerings, blog and podcasts for resources to affirm your vision and support your growth whether you are deciding whether to go to graduate school, struggling to finish or start your thesis or dissertation, needing tools to rearticulate your purpose or to build a community of support. I know that working with you, bright thunder aka brilliant visionaries who are ready to transform the world, will have an impact on the meaning of scholarship and the usefulness of intellectuals for generations to come.
Let’s get started!
With love,
Alexis Pauline Gumbs, PhD
Kwanzaa Poetry Challenge-Real Reading Rainbow: Queer Black Intergenerational BookLUST
‘Indigo Was the Folks’: AfterSchool Brilliance
“There wasn’t enough for Indigo in the world she’d been born to, so she made up what she needed. What she thought the black people needed.
Access to the moon.
The power to heal.
Daily visits with the spirits.”
-Ntozake Shange on little sister Indigo in her first novel Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo
We are in my car with the top down dodging the falling leaves when Assata drops knowledge on the subject of grades, a new clarity gained during this first term of 6th grade: “Grades are bullying the alphabet.” The girls find out that their hands can bend in ways they never knew. They read outloud parts of the books they are reading. They punch each other very lightly at the sight of a volkswagen bug. And this is just the car ride.
The Indigo Afterschool Program was an idea that 11 year old Alex Lockhart shared with her mother, using the words: “I want to go to an afterschool program at Alexis’s house.” Inspired by Ntozake Shange’s character “Indigo” from her first novel Sassafrass, Cypress and Indigo, the Indigo Afterschool TeaParty is a place to share dreams, make art, blow bubbles and investigate Indigo’s practices of healing, self-love, dream interpretation, doll-making, compassion and full self-expression! Girls from 3 Durham middle schools participate!
We check in over tea and snacks letting a deep breath out at the end of our check-ins by blowing a real or imaginary bubble. We make dolls that listen, healing remedies for emotional emergencies, books for our dreams, collages for our visions, love notes for each other in the name of Indigo who used all these things to create the world she needed when she was right in the arena of the menstrual transformation.
It is an honor to participate in the building of community and sisterhood among these brilliant young women, and as the Crunk Feminist Collective reminded us with their development of a women’s studies 101 workshop for high school students (http://crunkfeministcollective.wordpress.com/2011/10/26/feminism-101-or-why-womens-studies-cant-wait-a-workshop-for-girls/)
the intentional support and nourishment of the love, transformation and brilliance that is already living and growing and possible in young people can never start to early.
Indigo Afterschool uses the model of Indigo…just one of many audacious, inventive, complex, community accountable and wise young Black characters created by Black feminist writers to give young folks a chance to love each other and explore their own magical skills, a space to critique the norms they are noticing at school, and a validation of the practices of breathing, creating and listening.
As people around the country reclaim space in their communities to activate their visions I am proud that the space that these 11 year olds (who have just proposed an expansion of the program to bi-weekly sessions) have decided to takeover my living room with their dreams.
(Here is what Alex left on the chalkboard)
Indigo Style Remedies:
Yesterday we read some of Indigo’s remedies that she creates after difficult experience and share with her community of dolls so that her growth can also benefit them. Oh Indigo!!!
Rock in the manner of a quiet sea. Hum softly from your heart. Repeat the victim’s name with love. Offer a brew of red sunflower to cleanse the victims blood and spirit. Fasting & silence for a time refurbish the victim’s awareness of her capacity to nourish & heal herself.
The Indigo After School crew also wrote their own remedies yesterday (they also wrote a healing recipe for popcorn, getting past writers block and “boredness”).
Here is some of their advice…that I recommend keeping on hand or enacting right now for your own healing:
Emergency Care for the “the funk”
by Bailey
(i.e. like on Glee, when they were in a funk because they were afraid their singing group wasn’t good enough)
Surround oneself with loved ones, then go on top of a tall object and scream to hearts content all of ones deepest feelings. If this does not work, go in private room and listen to songs that mention only of happy things, then write down all of ones problems and think of a way to turn them around.
Emergency for Sadness
by Assata
1. go to the bathroom and turn on hot water. let it steam.
2. get your favorite incense and burn it
3. get a robe and put it on
4. put the incense in the bathroom
5. put a stool in the bathroom
6. write all the things you are sad about on a piece of paper
7. write on the steamed mirror all the things that are peaceful
8. sit in the bathroom and be peaceful with the steaming and the incense
Forged by Fire (for hard experiences that change you forever):
by Alex
Bathe in a tub of warm water without bubbles. Slowly lie down and let all the bad energy out. When you get out, don’t dry off, instead go to a silent room and let the peaceful air dry you off. Next rub your skin with soothing lavender oil. Now go outside and let the sun wrap its loving rays around you.
Amazing! Priceless and here is how you can support this space!
1. Of course donating to the Eternal Summer of the Black Feminist Mind one time
or becoming a monthly sustainer helps infinitely to sustain this free program for superhero youth.
2. This community of readers is the best thing ever. Want to send as a winter break gift 1 or 3 copies of your favorite young adult book from when you were around 11? The Indigo afterschoolers are self-identified “cool nerds” and will need a lot of reading material when school lets out next month to keep their brains engaged! Email alexispauline@gmail.com for the address.
3. Or contribute to the Eternal Summer of the Black Feminist Mind Library that surrounds and uplifts the participants and their parents and grandparents and younger siblings and friends by donating a book from the Eternal Summer amazon wishlist!
http://www.amazon.com/gp/registry/wishlist/9JXRNX84Z3R9
Keeping it quirky, eternal and off the hook!
Love,
lex
Video: Empowering Force of Feminist Teaching | Watch Black Issues Forum Online | UNC-TV Video
Often praised for their strength, many black women nonetheless suffer lives of victimization and oppression. Author and black feminist activist Dr. Alexis P. Gumbs uses black feminist thought in her intergenerational self-empowerment workshops. Hear her strategy. Watch online: Empowering Force of Feminist Teaching from Black Issues Forum. On demand, streaming video from UNC-TV
