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.
I’m been talking here about finding my tribe. About my search for comrades in solidarity. I’ve remained pine in the process, for real. From one particular source I asked for further reading, as something was niggling me. Id expressed my concerns in terms of using the oppressors language as well as, well I felt as, the lack of warmth, kindness, care and love. And then through the further reading it all became clear. This was my response.
I believe that there needs to be unity to fight all oppressions. You can’t fight racism without fighting against capitalism.
But I realise through this further reading where my concerns lie. It’s not in the socialist/Marxist movement as a whole but it’s with the people who make up the movement.
I’m not sure if the people of the movement have/ or continue to take the time to work on their own racism. There seems to be a given that because the movement is against all oppressions that it means those who are part of the movement can’t be racist or sexist because they say they are against all forms of oppression. Saying it is one thing. Practising it is another.
In practice there is still the use of the oppressors language as I’ve mentioned before. Using ‘non-white’ or ‘minorities’ is offence as they still centre whiteness which is used for division and oppression.
The articles mention the BPP alienating white people because of their support for Black Nationalism and Separatism, and their language used around Black Power. You even mentioned yourself that we can’t fight capitalism through language and its use. Modifying language is not going to bring about material change you say.
And yet it is language the party is using to rally the masses, to bring people together. Language is the tool of persuasion no? Language is the tool of education.
But if that language continues to use the language of the oppressor and is offensive to certain groups of people, they are accused of being confused, ill informed and falling into the identity politics trap again.
However, from my experience, through reading the literature of the party, I feel that the language used reflects a party line where the people behind that line are not continuing to work on their own racism/ biases while focusing their efforts on society’s ills, outside of themselves.
I do not feed into white supremacy culture with the characteristics of either/or. I believe in and/both. That means for me, there has to be the work on the individual’s internalised racism and sexism at the same time as working against oppressions within society. Working on our own blind spots and prejudices can only benefit the movement as a whole. Where this fails to take place is where the oppressors divide and rule become fixed without our recognition of it.
To say that ‘non-white’ is every day language, quote, ‘commonly understood by ordinary people as respectful ways to refer to some people who are oppressed’, as a black person being referred to as ‘non-white’ is offensive to me and I’m not really bothered if other black people are okay with it. I might be falling into an identity police trap but one my identity is not built on my relation to whiteness that is racism. Two, if someone says they find it offensive and that is not recognised or is questioned and explained away as being the norm is denying that person’s experience which is racist. Three, to bring this up then to have it dismissed as being defensive and accusing someone of being a bigot/ racist and dismissed as a distraction from the cause is another example of an individual failing to check themselves and work on themselves to combat their racism/ discrimination tendencies.
I work on myself daily to check my prejudices or biases or judgments and blind spots. I only wish more people would also as I do believe the world would be a better place because of it. Movements and societies are groupings made up of individuals. Working on the individual at the same time as the collective can only strengthen that connection and keep moving it forward in an effective way, I believe.
If we think about what is happen in the USA today, and the ICE raids within every community. The Latino community is coming out and asking where are the black people why are they not out here on the streets with them protesting? Why are they sitting this fight out etc.? Black people are tired, esp. black women. Black people told everyone to vote for Kamala Harris and they didn’t listen. They voted for Trump. And now he is doing all that he said he would do.
Now people are asking for black people once again to put their bodies on the line. And yeah this is a prime example of the ruling class dividing and ruling. Pitting one group against another. But what is true there and what is true here, black people only make up a small percentage of the population. In the states 12% here 4% with other ethnicities. And yet it is expected for us to save the world. ( Aside here we might be termed ‘minorities’ within these countries but we are the global majority. I don’t use ‘minorities’ because it is used as language of control. Black Feminism or Third World Feminism has always been global in its remit).
It is expected for black people to put aside those differences which on a daily effect our life chances. Our lives in terms of life and death. And this is not feeding into a victim hierarchy and who’s suffering is more than someone else’s. It’s a reality. Black people, black women do not just suffer violence and brutality from the state but do so from person to person in their every day and yet black feminism still criticises and attempts to bring material change for all through fighting all oppressions including capitalism and yet if they ‘fail’ to bring about material change it is because of ill-fighting or confusion in their ideology but no mention of doing this within a racist/ sexist society that does not see Black women as anything except mules of the world. Not either/or but and/both.
As black women we continue to not be seen as human. Read Fugitive Feminism by Akuwgo Emejulu to understand this, which is anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist and anti-colonialist. It’s arguing for a rejection of the whole system. A refusal of what has already been refused to us. Other ways of being are possible.
Marx himself saw the future of capitalism as self-destruction and a social mode of production being the outcome. Fugitive Feminism is being/working now with the other possibilities. It’s about creating an outside while still on the inside. Creating spaces of liberation and joy on our own terms. It’s not waiting until then for it to be now. It’s collective and speculative and might be fostered by black women but can be utilised for all, all oppressions including capitalism and the class struggle. It is probably dismissed though because it comes from the mouths, minds and hearts of black women.
Thanks for all these readings. They have helped in clarifying where I stand. In solidarity but at the same time in my own fullness and power which I lend to any movement which recognises this and works with me to bring about dismantling all oppressions for all people.
The reply I got, was thanks, I’ll reflect on it, and wish you luck on finding your people.
I’m sharing it here as I don’t want my realisation to do to waste. The words I shared to go to waste, as I’m still open for the conversation, still open to standing together.
This short piece is a mash up of a certain clip from Joaquina de Angola: Memory of a Liberation by Aida Bueno Sarduy and music from Insight Timer, called You.
Seen recently in Barcelona at CCCB, Joaquina de Angola: Memory of a Liberation by Aida Bueno Sarduy is an audiovisual installation that recovers the story of Joaquina, a young woman enslaved on a plantation in Brazil, and her escape.
“A work about archived, forgotten, and silenced voices in the history of slavery and colonialism. This audiovisual installation brings to life the act of “unarchiving” an event recorded in colonial history as an escape. A 15-year-old enslaved girl fled the plantation where she lived, and her owner, after an unsuccessful search, placed an ad in the newspaper offering a reward to whoever found her. The archive reveals nothing more about this incident: it merely collects it as a piece of data. This piece challenges the oblivion, archiving, and silencing of this character. To unarchive, in this context, becomes an artistic and political act that brings Joaquina de Angola out of the shadows of the document, removing her gag and chains so that she can tell her own story. This act not only questions the record but also raises questions and delves into its details. It is an inquiry that brings Joaquina back to life and acknowledges her as a cimarrona, calling upon ancestral memory as well as imagination, intuition, and spirituality. Since the beginning of colonization in Brazil, alliances and exchanges of extraordinary significance have taken place between Indigenous peoples and enslaved Africans, but these have also been silenced. The presence of entities known as caboclos (Indigenous spirits) in all Afro-Brazilian religions is perhaps the most consistent and profound evidence of this. Amazonian peoples, Indigenous peoples from across Brazil, and quilombola communities—formed by Afro-descendant peoples—have shared ancestral struggles for the defense of their territories and against colonization and exploitation. The installation speculates on these possible Afro-Indigenous alliances in Joaquina de Angola’s journey toward freedom.”
This extracted masheup with music created above by myself, hence a found poetry film, is my take at a beginning of exploring fugitivity. I’ve been living, breathing, talking, practicing fugitivity for a few years now. I’ve mentioned it before, and it was Dal Kular who first introduced the term of me via her then newsletter, Field Notes. Dal said at the beginning of Jan 2023,
“Whatever the out-there-in-the-world fuckery is going on in 2023, I declare myself a CREATIVE FUGITIVE. A way of living in this world but not of it.”
Her take on creative fugitivity has stuck with me. I’ve gone on to read more around fugitivity. I’m even writing a chapter, at the moment, around black mothering and fugitivity. Fugitivity is taking over my life. And again I’m creating a project here in my portfolio to collect my wanderings and wonderings around this concept and way of being.
For me in a nutshell, fugitivity is the act of flight. It is the withdrawing of my labour and consent in the current system of white supremacy culture, capitalism, imperialism, colonialism. Fugivitiy is refusal and resistance. Divesting from the current way things are playing out as the few hoard the wealth of the world at the expense of the many.
Originally the fugitive was the runaway, the escapee. Hence why the audio-visual installation and consequent fugitive poetry film was created. I’m starting from the origins of the escaping enslaved. Running, fleeing captivity towards freedom. Freedom being the end point, the destination but in the process of escaping, there is the in-between space between what they were fleeing from and fleeing to. And here in this liminal space is where fugitivity is ripe.
There/ here is the lingering in the midst of flight, where I choose to SLOW down and be. To linger with nature. To seek my joy and pleasure in the world around me on my own terms. Fred Moten in conversation with Saidiya Hartman, both of whom we will be exploring further, said,
“I often use – and I always think of it in relation to Fannie Lou Hamer, because it’s just me giving a theoretical spin on a formulation she made in practice: to refuse that which has been refused to you. And that’s what I’m interested in.”
That is fugitivity as a method, kin-making and place-making, as a practice that I intend to explore within this project archive.
Living Wild Studios 