Electric Mouths / Wide Open / Catching Rain
Young women, three-quarter length portrait, from The Exhibit of American Negroes, 1900 via aperture.com
Hi yall!
heyyyyyy
We are going to get started.
We come from everywhere. Maryland. Durham, NC — The Bull City. Nairobi! Puerto Rico <3 Ohio. Cherokee Homeland, colonized as Northeast GA. Houston, TX! Bowdoin College, Maine. Baltimore!! DC! Shout out to ATL!
We give thanks. Congrats! Amazing, important work. Congratulations!! Congratulations, Briona on this gorgeous and momentous book! So many thanks to Prof. De Veaux and hosts. Thank you all for this illuminating, strengthening event. So many congratulations to Briona! Briona's "thinking career" has changed me already. Thanks for that! Yesss Briona!!!! Intergenerational OVATION!!!! Yes Sista Docta Yomaira!!! Transforming generations on a CELLULAR level!!!!!! Dr. NEAL!!!!💜💜💜💜 Yes, thank you Jada.
Alexis De Veaux reads to us. Interspecies. Makes us feel different, almost new.
We sigh with pleasure. GORGEOUS. UGH I LOVE THIS SO MUCH. I’m crying. DONT START OR I WILL OMG. Its too much <3. I’m super emotional. Whooooo! Weeeeelll I been crying. Ohmigod so beautiful.
We bout to be a mess.
We cannot even.
We gather.
We ask about the pleasure in reading to and being read to. Does this become a kind of engendering experience, a way of mapping gender? Of seeing each other / hearing each other into a gendered becoming?
We ask about the relationship between voice/listening/gender.
We ask about the genealogies of being other than/beyond the category of the human. We speak Sylvia Wynter’s name.
We name Black lesbianism as a model for being beyond the category of the human. These 400 Odd. Years. All these odd years. Odd. Years.
We gasp. This reclamation of the excised pleasure is poignant. We pleasure ourselves by reading with and circulating the book. We attend to Alexis De Veaux’s instruction: “Get AT LEAST two copies.” She said. (Yes!!! Yes!)
We name the names in a glittering litany of claiming. adrienne marie brown’s Pleasure Activism. Toni Cade Bambara’s The Black Woman. Cherrie Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa’s This Bridge Called My Back. Lisa Moore’s Does Your Mama Know. Redbone Press. Afrekete. Keguro Macharia’s Frottage. Alexis Pauline Gumbs’s M-Archive. Spillers and ungendering. Wynter, “The Ceremony Must be Found.” Alexis Pauline Gumb’s Dub. “I’m feeling the Spirit of Pat Parker and want to raise her up!” Where will you be energies! Mel Michelle Lewis' work on queer pedagogy. The woman who "shaped me" and set me free … an unflinching, relentless woman of color from the global south…who people literally threatened to kill for being that thing. The women long with the ancestors: Emilia Viotti da Costa. June Jordan who says we’re “passing through.” Jada Similton’s latest Electric Blog: A Radical-Love Politic: What Visiting Puerto Rico Taught Me About Kinship. Black queer radical generosity…
We love our librarians. We love our archivists. You tend to the work. We hold you up. “YES HOLLY! Supremely helpful and kind—we hope she’s in here and feeling the love through time and space.”
We did not come here for revelation. But here, you have it. We have been SHAPED.
Detail from the 1993 cover of Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler; cover art by John Jude Palencar
“I don't think I've ever been in a webinar where the citational practice is so deliberate and so careful and never gratuitous.”
Citation as sacred practice—thank you for modeling and practicing this.
We name ourselves in the tradition of these names, humbly, heads bowed, like prayers: (((THEE Judith Casselberry))) Kegurooooooooo! Sangodare in the house!!! <3 Jessica!!! Alexis💜Alexis. Professor Adderley is here!!!!! Shout out to Professor Neal in the room!! YESSSSS DOCTOR FIGUEROA!!!!!!!!!! Yooooo Figgyyyy!!! Alexis taught me to love literature again after I forgot. Love you Alexis!!!!! HI APG!!!! <3 <3 <3 Love ya, Ma Alexis!
We are marking time and space, new cartographies of flesh and delight. We claim space from them. We claim space for us. From the white midwesterners. We write Lorraine Hansberry quotes over their faces, make it precious.
We are life.being.made.possible.
We are teaching each other. At Yale. At JHU. At MSU. At home. On the block. Beyond the galaxy.
We are bringing to bear what already was and always in the context of the future, when it comes to the mouth. We are bending time.
Our organization and structure is powerful, creates a world in time. We are framed and opened by these words. We are bending time.
How important was collaboration for this project? It was the the unbreakable thread. It moved us past the terrifying and unimaginable.
What kinds of advice do you have for scholars wanting to make a similar offering for their communities and beyond?
Remember this scattering. Queerness is part of the scattering.
Remember: “Queerness didn’t just begin in me, it’s something that I inherited from my ancestors, from my people.”
Remember: "it's not possible that I'm the only and the first." (A word)
Briona Simone Jones
Remember we are a demonic ground, y’all! We speak of place.
Remember that “freedom and love are DOING words…” A promise.
Remember: “The future is your next breath/the future of language is in your mouth.”
Remember: "My breathing is an erotic experience."
“We are already in the elsewhere here,” Alexis De Veaux said #TrueFacts
We are interested in the Erotic(s) shaping the intimacy. We know coming out as metamorphosis.
We are challenging faith. #Baptist Preach!!!!!! Àse
We ask questions. Keep them coming!!!
We are excavating Black lesbian survival! We are *unwinding* and we are an invitation.
We are embracing our ancestral queerness.
We are creating new black genders.
We say yes and move TOWARDS.
Alexis de Veaux
We ask “How am I DEFINING ME?!” against and beyond “these capitalist ideas …" We know individual human subjectivity was fetishized by those enslaving capitalists. We say no to their visions of achievement/excellence. We define our own.
We theorize thriving! Our mouths are futures. Our mouths are rain.
We ask and come to ask you, ask each other: “Are you doing your work!!! Love love love!!!”
We define ourselves against assigned “chaos roles” because we know Wynter. We make our own.
We been here. Kind of breathlessly following and losing all our own thoughts in the breathlessness.
We reject a world where our work is undervalued. We seek new worlds where we tend.to.each.other.
We “came to the classroom to BE BLACK.“ We make it a refrain. ( 🖤i came to be BLACK🖤) (“I came to the classroom to BE BLACK”) (🖤be BLACK beyond the trauma🖤) (Love that, being Black beyond the trauma)
Blackness come thru!!!!! Black. Always.
We push the boundaries. Make them feel it. (I’m gonna try it!) (But this was the 90s 😂)
"We have talked about everything there is to be talked about." We have created those new worlds and then some.
Gay Pride Parade, London, United Kingdom, June 1985. Photo via GETTY. H/T 365daysoflesbians.tumblr.com
We are obsessed with kinship. That kinship work!!!!!! The interspecies kin! “It was my cat that raised my hand!!! He wanted Alexis to know we are here! I’m so embarrassed!” We aren’t! We welcome it. Your cat is a genius!
My cat is way into Black lesbian feminist thought and is LOVING this.
“This reclamation of the excised pleasure is poignant in relationship to this idea of reading with and circulating the book.”
This is what we DO.
I ATTEST TO THAT.
We have been SHAPED. (COME ON PREACH BRIONA!)
Lenn Keller, Black lesbian mother and son at SF Gay Pride, San Francisco, 1984. Courtesy: H. Lenn Keller via Frieze Magazine
We have been seen & kept.
“This collection is an offering. In it, I aspire to trace the long history of love between Black women because I have come to recognize that our love stories have been buried underneath our activism. But our love, too, is both personal and political.” (xxv). Healing words. Words that can heal broken flesh.
(Yes. Healing words.) (Mercy) (Words that could heal broken flesh…)
Beautiful people in the chat…tell us who you are taking with you, in relation to you, on the way out of this talk…
We don’t record. We live in ephemerality. Like Prince said “you have a recording in your mind.” A conversation that only those present in this room at this time can have—to paraphrase of adrienne maree brown in Emergent Strategy. You had to be there to see it, see us. Even if you were late, you were just in time to this question, this conversation.
But this group poem of a chat! We need it! It is - a perfect way to start the weekend! (Dedicating to my niece who turns three years old tomorrow.💜) (Dedicate to my first Black feminist thought professor Dr. Guy-Sheftall) (Dedicating to the men and trans* gnc femmes in the archives of my work, who perished from AIDS and knew that black lesbianism was a way to survive and carry forward) (Still stuck on remembering Emila Da Costa … and can’t not) (Dedicating to the disappeared) (Dedicating to ourselves)
This we leave you with. Thank you for coming, everyone. Thank you all for being here!!!!
(yess) (Loooooove!) (We love YOU!!!!💜💜💜) (yessss) (Get AT LEAST two copies!💜💜💜💜) (Yesss!!!!!) (Amen!!!!!!!) (Yes!!!) (Yes and it must continue) (WOW) (Yesss!!!! Teach Briona!!!) (Love love love) (Forever and ever ever) (Yaaaaaaaaayyyyyy!!!!!!💜💜💜💜💜) (Thank you, thank you <3 <3 <3) (Thank you for this wonderful, wonderful, wonderful session) (Thank you all. I hate zoom and academia and talking about books online: EXCEPT THIS ONE.) (deepest love, so amazing!!!) (This was so beautiful. Such a balm…thank you!)
And, of course, we still here!!!💜 (We can say hi if y’all want!)