After a busy week, where it felt as if I didn’t get a weekend, because I didn’t as I was permaculturing and fugitivity spreading, I’m making myself comfy and cosy.
I’m all wrapped up in bed, catching up with my creativity. Catching up with myself.
And I feel so grateful for this cosy fort, for the week I’ve enjoyed, mostly on my own terms, and for the weekend to come. Rest and creative fugitivity.
I’ve still got mothering and taxiing duties this evening but I feel, in my cosy fortress, I’m on my own time/space.
I get to play and be curious and satisfy my desires. And right now all I want to do is be here. Right. Now.
I’m safe. I’m warm. I’m stealing my life back. Each cosy, comfy fort at a time.
I come here with a heart filled with joy, love and gratitude.
I put my heart, soul, care and dreams into the WOC Azadi Collective fugitivity visual journaling retreat today.
The time/space we created together was magical. We’re becoming a fugitive collective, creating mischief as we steal ourselves away. Steal our lives back from systems of oppression, systems we never consented to but find ourselves subjected it.
We refuse.
I have so much love and gratitude for Dal Kular who got me back to work with the collective. Dal sees my practices and processes around my visual journaling and fugitivity and constantly cheers me on, holds space and supports me to explore these further in collective/ collaboration with beautiful people.
What we created was powerful and ripe with possibilities. What we can do together is empowering and criminal. Disorderly and messy and so much needed.
There are other ways to {BE} and I’m all for exploring these further, deeper, together.
Ring Shout by P. Djèlí Clark is a book I can’t get out of my head since I finished reading it.
A dark gothic southern historical fantasy novella set in 1920s Macon, Alabama, just after the 1915 film The Birth of the Nation which is being used to grow the KKK but to another level of Ku Kluxes. Monsters upon monsters.
And who is there to fight them and save the day if not three black women armed with blade, bullets and bomb. Helped with special powers and kinship with Gullah women and the supernatural.
Published on October 13, ( my birthday) 2020, this book blurred all the genres, redefines narratives and timelines and had me hooked from start to finish. It messed with my expectations and just left me wanting more.
I hope there’s going to be a sequel as these characters are too powerful and inspiring to be left in one novella.
I’ve got a reading streak going on with kindle – not including the physical books I’ve read this year.
I’m at about 210 days and 70 books done. I surpassed my projection of 50 books on kindle.
Anyway when I get sick, I get to taking it even slower and instead of watching pap TV I turn to books to escape from my uncomfortableness and irritability.
It soothes me to read a good book. And I’ve been getting into speculative fiction. I would have said I’m crime fiction and romance fiction till I die. But once I’ve come to realise, really see how both of these genres prop up the capitalist, white supremacy, patriarchal, colonialist system, I can no longer read them with joy.
I can no longer read them full stop. So to fill the void, I’ve been reading non-fiction by black authors and speculative fiction by black authors too.
If I’m gonna be buying this shit then let me buy the shit that supports my people and continues to help me get free.
I don’t know if I expressed it openly but I’ve been trying to post every day here in honour of a practice from years ago of being creative every day.
This last week, home alone and probably depressed, I’ve been beating myself up for not doing more. More out in society as well as within my own practice. I’ve been on a rollercoaster of emotions and I’ve not been kind towards myself.
Coming out the other end though I can see that I’ve been doing what I’ve needed. Rest yes but also quiet, small magic.
I’ve been collecting brown paper from packages. I thought I’d use them within the creative retreats I facilitated this year but it didn’t happen. So I have a very large pile and what I love about the brown paper apart from the sound and texture is the un/uniformativity of it.
These papers are teared to fuck. Fragile and worn and rough. And I love feeling them. So this week, I might not have been posting here but my sitting room became a factory conveyer belt as brown paper got the credit card treatment of smeared paints. Acrylic paints that I’m using up that I love the mixtures of, that gets under my nails and onto the carpet. And I love it. One side wait to dry and then the next and then let’s fold and put these single sheets together to make a whole
This practice has made me whole again this week. I’ve been writing within this new journal this past couple of days and I feel so good to be doing so. Better.
I’m grateful to wake up each morning and {BE}. I’m grateful that I’m no longer chasing recognition and the big bucks. I’m grateful that I don’t give a fuck about being perfect and always having to smile.
I’m grateful for the community I have around me. Cultivated over years. They care for me and I care for them.
I’m grateful to myself for never giving up on me and for always having my back even when it feels I’m falling apart. Falling apart but big hands to put me back together again, but better.
“Wherever blackness dwells—slave ship, spaceship, graveyard, garden, elsewhere, everywhere—those captives accessed what Spillers calls a “richness of possibility.” Hortense Spillers quoted in La Marr Jurelle Bruce, How To Go Mad Without Losing Your Mind: Madness and Black Radical Creativity.
Okay where to begin.. That has been the issue – worried about where to begin has stopped me beginning. But now I’ve got to begin as I need to get it out of me onto the page, in order to create some kind of sense of it all. So maybe I’ll begin with the Combahee River Collective (CRC).
I’m diving into the realms of Black Feminism- thought and theory and practices.
I’ve already been in the thick of it for years, with me first coming to Black Feminism through my degree and then masters and then this forming the foundation really of my PhD when I traced the tradition of Black British Women’s Poetry. But retaining knowledge and theory is difficult when I keep putting new things in my brain.
I don’t want to be an expert on Black Feminism but I do want to revisit it and consider it’s premise again in light of recent readings and experiences.
So I begin with the Combahee River Collective Statement, 1977. And I’m not saying that this is the beginning of Black Feminism. But I’m using it as a marker along the way. I figure if I keep this statement in clear view, using it like a signpost then I can’t stray too far off the path.
This exploration of Black Feminist thought is going to be a new folder within this website’s portfolio as this is area of research is something I plan to keep returning back to and adding to as I continue to re-familiarise as well as extend my thinking and practices around Black Feminism.
So what is the Combahee River Collective Statement all about. Well first you can was the full statement here.
It has been argued that this statement issue by a collective of Black women in Boston in 1977 who came together after witnessing an recognising the racism within the women’s movement and the sexism within the race/ civil rights movement, was based on the reality that Black women’s experiences cannot be reduced to either race or gender but have to be understood on their own terms.
Combahee River Collective Statement introduced to the world terms such as “interlocking oppression” and “identity politics.” Formed in 1974, The Combahee River Collective (CRC) was a radical Black feminist organisation which took it’s name from Harriet Tubman’s 1853 raid on the Combahee River in South Carolina that freed 750 enslaved people.
It might have been The Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989 who coined the phrase “intersectionality” but it was CRC who articulated the analysis that underpins the meaning of intersectionality. The idea that multiple oppressions reinforce each other to create new categories of suffering, these interlocking oppressions, happening simultaneously, renders the Black woman’s position in society unique and most direr.
As the statement begins:
“The most general statement of our politics at the present time would be that we are actively committed to struggling against racial, sexual, heterosexual, and class oppression, and see as our particular task the development of integrated analysis and practice based upon the fact that the major systems of oppression are interlocking. The synthesis of these oppressions creates the conditions of our lives. As Black women we see Black feminism as the logical political movement to combat the manifold and simultaneous oppressions that all women of color face.”
It goes on to state:
“Merely naming the pejorative stereotypes attributed to Black women (e.g., mammy, matriarch, Sapphire, whore, bulldagger), let alone cataloguing the cruel, often murderous, treatment we receive, indicates how little value has been placed upon our lives during four centuries of bondage in the Western Hemisphere. We realize that the only people who care enough about us to work consistently for our liberation are us. Our politics evolve from a healthy love for ourselves, our sisters and our community which allows us to continue our struggle and work”.
CRC comes to the conclusion that:
“We might use our position at the bottom, however, to make a clear leap into revolutionary action. If Black women were free, it would mean that everyone else would have to be free since our freedom would necessitate the destruction of all the systems of oppression”.
And this would come to pass through the practice of the revolutionary politics of Black Feminism.
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