Long Distance Love for Indigo Journeys: Support 7th Graders in their Black Feminist Brilliance!!!!

Greetings loved ones,
The Indigo Afterschool Program for brilliant black feminists in middle school (inspired by Ntozake Shanges Sassafrass, Cypress and Indigo) here in Durham is evolving into the Indigo Journeys program, a curriculum of visionary black feminist fieldtrips and monument making!!!!    The Indigo Geniuses have grown and shown the divine skill of creating sacred space through developing and sharing their own Sisterhood Museum* with our local community and now we will be growing and showing the skill of creating sacred space and being sacred space WHEREVER WE GO!!!  Behold the power and creativity of black girls!!!

This weekend the Geniuses and their mamas are hosting an Indigo Tea Dance Support Raiser here in Durham to invite our community to support the resources, financial and logistical that will support the Indigo Journeys.   Since the groove transcends space and time you will all be dancing with us in spirit! I want to personally invite all of you who believe that the brilliance of black girls demands our collective resourcefulness and creativity to send support for this life giving project!
Here is the invitation to support from the Indigo Mamas:
Last year, Alexis Pauline Gumbs and our daughters created Indigo Afterschool, a creative superspace for the young geniuses to learn, create, and love with the guidance of sista docta Alexis. Their weeks together culminated in the creation of a beautiful museum full of stories and art. This spring, Alexis and the girls will venture on Indigo Journeys in the form of Mother-Daughter Art Outings and Indigo Legacy Field Trips to learn about important black feminist sites in North Carolina.
Contributions of any amount are appreciated, as well as gas cards, and gift cards for an oil change, a car wash, a Frankie's outing, or groceries. 
You can donate through Alexis' Donation Station: http://brokenbeautiful.wordpress.com/make-love/
Email brokenbeautifulpress@gmail.com to get the address to send gift cards (Kroger, Food Lion or Harris Teeter cards will work locally)
Love,
Lex
*The Sisterhood Museum was adapted from the Brotherhood/Sistersol Curriculum in Harlem with much love and appreciation!

Imprisoned by Our Literature: Black Women and Incarceration

In 2010, I became a collective member of a non-profit prison book program. For the last twenty-two years, the program has been sending literature/books to people incarcerated. One of my responsibilities at this program is to work directly with the women’s book request from a Pennsylvanian Woman's state prison. I immediately noticed the difference in the book requests from the women at this prison versus the men, who make up the bulk of our overall letters. The men would request materials on everything from black radicalism, vocational studies, and for GED prep books. The ones, who were not as literate, requested dictionaries, so they could teach themselves how to read (mainly inspired by Malcolm Little [X] and his quest for knowledge).

And the Women? With the occasional gardening and self-help book, they were mainly requesting Urban Fiction. Letter after letter, Black Women were making requests for “hood books”; with titles such as ‘Gangster Wife” and “Thongs on Fire”. Why weren't they requesting protest literature too? Where were their dictionaries or Kaplan book requests? It did not take long, to see that Triple Crown Publishing replaced the Blackness of Third World Publishing and the writings by women of color of the Kitchen Table Press.

I conveyed my feelings to another collective member at the organization, who shrugged and replied, “Maybe that is their reality?” I refused to believe that one type of book made up anyone's reality; especially Black Women. Perhaps a very small slice, but definitely not a whole. As I would process these letters, and send these packages off, I knew in the pit of my Black Women soul that these Women were being sold cheap with these books. Urban fiction is cool, but what else? With the support of the organization (and financial backing), I created “Everyday Use: A Woman's Literary Insurgency”. It was a collection of writings put together of Black Women Writers. From Sister Souljah to Toni Morrison. Audre Lorde to bell hooks; this 235-page booklet dripped with the Black Gospel of Black Women Writers. Sistas were getting the prophecy of love, self-esteem, motherhood and the erotica. With every request for a “hood book”, “Everyday Use” was sent alongside their request. Black Women were writing back, stating that they were being introduced to these writers for the first time. They were passing it on to their cell mates and even one woman wrote me and told me that she had sent her booklet home to her daughter, because “she needs it, she needs to read what these Sistas are saying...”.

We were creating a literary community behind those walls.

 As soon as we started, it ended. Booklets were being returned. I called the mailroom at the prison. No response. Everyday for about two weeks, I called that prison, and after much harassing on my part, a letter was sent to me, stating that the prison decided that photocopies were not being allowed in the prison. Just like that, they issued a new rule, and blocked our booklet from going through. I wanted to fight this decision on a bigger level, but I knew that this would put all requests in jeopardy from sending future book requests to that prison (a couple of years ago, they rejected our books, because there was too much tape on the packages!). Once again, these prisons win (although in my heart, the forty or so booklets that made it in have lit some Black Woman's fire!). I write this essay, so the world can understand that these prisons are not in the interest of the people receiving information for self/communal reliance. They will always prefer a book called “G-Spot” as opposed to “Sisters of the Yams: Black Women and Self-Recovery”. A: “Lick Me All Over” as oppose to a “Use of the Erotica”. Malcolm X once said, “The ability to read awoke inside of me some long dormant craving to be mentally alive.” If we leave it up to the prisons, they would prefer that we keep the minds of our women in death.

Iresha Picot, M.Ed, is a Prison Abolished currently living in Philly. You can reach her Iresha.Picot@gmail.com

QBG Lex wants to be your Black Feminist Birth Doula!

from Lex and her mom's new project:  Dynamic Dou: A Mother/Daughter Doula Team
"54. everyone is waiting
to see what great thing
you'll do next." -from Wishful Thinking by Alexis Pauline Gumbs

http://alexispauline.chipin.com/rebirth-doula-dreams-coming-true
Following in her mom Pauline's footsteps, Alexis will be participating in the International Center for Traditional Childbirth's Full Circle Doula training Nov 1-4th in Dallas, TX.  Yay!!!!

From Lex:
When I was born my mother, like many young mothers of color, was forced to have an unnecessary c-section.  This was an act of disrespect by doctors who put their convenience over my family's wishes and it did not honor the way my mother and I wanted to come into each others lives.  What would have been different if there had been a black feminist doula (or two) at the scene of my birth affirming my mother's power?   My journey to become a doula and especially to do doula work together with my mother is a major act of healing.  It is my intention that every child will one day be born into a world where the magic and power of black women is revered and respected at every moment!  It is also a necessary act of revisiting my own birth that I see as a crucial part of my journey to become a mother someday soon! :)

Becoming a community supported doula is a dream coming true and a wish about to be fulfilled.  DO you believe that the world will be better with our mother/daughter doula project?  Do you believe in the power of a black feminist love evangelist poet facilitator in the birthing room?  Then YOU are part of the community that I am accountable to!
I am looking for 57 people to donate any amount that feels right to them as an affirmation of the necessity and power of this work we are doing together to rebirth the world!  Each donor will receive an original collage based around the 57 wish poem  Wishful Thinking.   I appreciate your support and your love!  Spread the word!  And donate here:

http://alexispauline.chipin.com/rebirth-doula-dreams-coming-true
Love,
Lex

Daily Bread: Sustainable Nourishing Practices for Community Accountable Scholars

(images by Mekhi Baldwin)

Audre Lorde’s contemporary and interlocuter James Baldwin talked about the passion of making love and breaking bread as equal versions of presence and purpose.  Last night during the LAST (sniffle) session of the first every Brilliance Remastered Webinar on a Sustainable Erotics of Community Accountable Scholarship we talked about how to make passionate and connected work our everyday practice and how to put spaces, places, times and reminders in our lives to bring us back to passionate purpose whenever we feel disconnected from the source of our transformative brilliance.
This may look like a group poem, but it is really a spell, blessing everyday forward and binding our love-filled Brilliance Remastered crew together forever!!!!!!!

Daily Bread
By the Sustainable Erotics Crew


connected to purpose like daily bread
giving thanks like daily bread
poetry like daily bread.
forgiveness like daily bread.
laughter like daily bread.
creating is my daily bread

loving like daily bread
making love like daily bread
loving my muscles like daily bread
(especially especially my heart)
smiling from the inside out like dailybread
celebrating me like daily bread
celebrating us like daily bread

embracing the now like daily bread
moving the body like daily bread, making new shapes
living in my body like daily bread

claiming my breathing like daily bread
shining my light like daily bread
affirming my being like daily bread

dancing like daily bread
sitting in silence like daily bread
listening like daily bread
listening to hear like daily bread
profound connection like daily bread.
sharing truth like daily bread


drinking water like daily bread
eating fruit like daily bread
good food like daily bread
deep breaths like daily bread
bubble baths and candles like daily bread

books on the bedside like daily bread.
feet on the ground like daily bread
walking with loved ones like bread (daily)
thanking my ancestors like daily bread

reaching out with love like daily bread.
showing affection like daily bread
touching things lightly like daily bread
being accountable like daily bread
being aware of surroundings like daily bread
immersing in the process like daily bread

questions rising like the bubbles of yeast in daily bread
speaking my mind even when my voice shakes like daily bread

thankful for another day’s daily bread

Video Recap of the Broken Beautiful Conference

Check out this recap video of the inspiring amazing Broken Beautiful Conference. I'm so affirmed and honored that the legacy of BrokenBeautiful Press is growing in such healing ways and led by brilliant young women of color!!!!!

This is What it Feels Like: Cultivating Our Measure of Passionate Purpose

Last night was the third session of Beyond the Feel-Good, our Brilliance Remastered webinar on cultivating a sustainable erotics of community accountable scholarship.  We are right in the midst of it, using Lorde's definition of the erotic to create new standards of brilliance for our work as love-fueled intellectuals.   Helped along by Lorde and also by Aretha Franklin's Dr. Feelgood we created this group poem to affirm that we KNOW what it feels like when it is right and we do not need to "sit and chit chat and smile" i.e. waste our time with anything less than profound, passionate, purposeful, presence in our work!  Feel free to feel it!!!!

This is What it Feels Like

“It is an internal sense of satisfaction to which, once we have experienced it, we know we can aspire.  For having experienced the fullness of this depth of feeling and recognizing its power, in honor and self-respect we can require no less of ourselves. “
-Audre Lorde  Uses of the Erotic

When it’s right it feels like a note Aretha just sang.
When it’s right it feels like dancing in warm rain.
When it’s right it feels like the ocean, ever deep, ever lifting me up.
When it’s right it feels like still waters rushing nowhere, knowing its source is the same place it must return.
When it’s right it feels like a “first” experience.
When it’s right it feels like a longing for something true, true feeling.
When it’s right it feels like a yearning, like intimacy without physical contact, a yearning of the spirit.
When it’s right it feels soft.
When it’s right it feels like fresh air.
When it’s right it feels like air gently bristling in the hairs on the back of my neck.
When it’s right it feels complicated sweet, freshing sweet, like lemonade.
When it’s right it feels abundant and free.
When it’s right it feels limitless.
When it’s right it feels timeless.
When it’s right it feels deep and endless.
When it’s right it feels like a way out of no way.
When it’s right it feels like something out of anything.
When it’s right it feels like gospel choirs singing!
When it’s right it feels like Nina and Jill and E. Badu and Ella getting together for a jam session.
When it’s right it feels like the music of the heart.
When  it’s right it feels like lovers.
When it’s right it feels like a mother’s hug.
When it’s right it feels like everyone is there, ancestors, future beings, everyone I love.
When it’s right it feels like a prepared-perfected-my-craft-ready-to-serve orgasm!
When it’s right it feels like the word “YES!” bursting in my chest.
When it’s right it feels unstoppable.
When it’s right it feels like I was meant to be no other place in the universe.
When it’s right it feels like Audre whispered this to June once, full of hope.
When it’s right it feels like a dream I had that must have never ended.
When it’s right it feels.
This is what it feels like!

Here: Remastering Our Presence in Academic Spaces-from the Brilliance Remastered Webinar Participants

Audre Lorde and students at Hunter College

Last night was the second session of our Brilliance Remastered Webinar Beyond the Feel-Good: A Sustainable Erotics of Community Accountable Scholarship.   Amazingness.  Last night we worked with Audre Lorde's clarity that "the erotic offers a well of replenishing and provocative force to the [person] who does not fear its revelation, nor succumb to the belief that sensation is enough."  And for those of us remastering our presence in academic spaces it is important for us to clarify that within an economy that wants to tokenize our brilliance, BEING a sensation, a shining exception, a validated symbol is not enough.  We are doing the intellectual work we are doing for much bigger reasons.  Betta recognize!   


Here

I am not just a sensation
I am inspiration
I am here to ignite a flame
I am here to change the world

I am not just a sensation
I am inspiration
I am here to sow seeds of magic
I am here to love
I am not here to settle
I am here to set the tone

I am not just a sensation
I am inspiration
I am knowing as an act
I am here to expand the limits
of what counts
as knowledge

I am not just a sensation
I am inspiration
I am here to unshackle brilliance
wherever it grows
I am here to make manifest
the dreams of my ancestors

I am not just a sensation
I am inspiration
I am here to imagine
I am here to create
I am here to dance
I am here to laugh to sing to share

I am not just a sensation
I am inspiration
I am here to be myself
I am here to be connected
I am here to engender vulnerability
and to make it possible
for those in the room to do the same

I am not just a sensation
I am inspiration
I am here to find a path to reconciliation

I am not just a sensation
I am inspiration
I am here to be accountable
I am here to hold others accountable

I am not just a sensation
I am inspiration
I am here to humanize
I am here to become more human
I am here to make meaning
I am here to be love

I am not just a sensation
I am inspiration
I am here to glow
I am here to know and to share
that to be young gifted and black AND queer
is a MARVELOUS thing to be

I am here to steal back the goodies

I am not just a sensation
I am inspiration
I am here to interrupt injustice
Yes I’m here to demand answers
and to ask more questions
and to ask and ask and ask and ask

I am inspiration
I am here to be like water
nourishing, remembering what you chose to forget
reflecting back to you your own image

I am inspiration
I am here to be a question mark
I am here to be an x that marks a spot
where love will outlive everything
I am here to make fertile the soil of our dreams
planting for a harvest I won’t ever reap in my lifetime

I am inspiration
I am not just a sensation, a temptation a distraction
I am unstoppable love in action.

Reclaiming YES!: Opening Affirmations from the Brilliance Remastered Crew!

Last night was the first session of the Beyond the Feel-Good Webinar on Sustainable Erotics of Community Accountable Scholarship.  And oh my goodness did we go beyond!  The Brilliance Remastered process never ceases to amaze and reawaken me!
As Audre Lorde says in her essay Uses of the Erotic: Power of the Erotic, "We have been raised to fear the yes within ourselves..."  Not at all coincidentally when we are out of touch with that YES within ourselves we are also more easily manipulated, bamboozled and led astray by the external maybes of capitalism, especially within the academic marketplace.   Our first step as a community in touch with our collective erotic power, our passionate purposefulness and our deep love for our communities is to reclaim YES and affirm YES in each other.  Here is our group poem. Feel free to read along (best articulated through grunts and screams).
Reclaiming Yes
YES!!! to acting on the impulse inside
YES!!! to defining the erotic as strength
YES!!! to claiming what we know deepest inside us as KNOWLEDGE
YES!!! brilliance remastered means brilliance unchained visible everywhere NOW!

YES!!! to our deepest desires
YES!!! to our power
YES!!! to being love
YES!!! to being me and not caring
YES!!! to being embodied in our classrooms and not being ashamed of that eros
YES!!! i tell my story. a black girl story without apology
YES!!! YESSSS to not apologizing!
YES!!! to facing fears
YES!!! to living in the moment and embracing all it brings
YES!!! to feeling even if it hurts
YESSS!!! to feeling
YES!!! i will create
YES!!! i will write. i am an author.
YES!!! my body knows and share its magic in my dance
YES!!! music and poetry, I will write and sing, play and work and dream a new world with you
YES!!! i will find the language to write within my community and not simply at my community
YES!!! to flying free and teaching others to soar
YES!!! to knowing that i don't know if ya'll don't know
YES!!! to creating together!
YES!!! to blurring and even better erasing boundaries
YES!!! to you in me and me in you and US!
YES!!! to learning and teaching!
YES!!!! i don't know if y’all dont know!!!
YES!!! to the communities to which we are called!
YES!!! to creating community wherever we are
YES!!! to love that circulates!

YES!!! to risking to love without guarantee or compromise
YES!!! i will love me even when I am pushed not to
YES!!! i love her even when its dangerous
YES!!! i will love the work even when it is difficult!
YES!!! i will embody my faith, even in the face of institutional judgment
YES!!! to knowing we were never meant to survive BUT thrive we must!
YES!!! love is lifeforce and I am meant to LIVE!
YES!!! to growing
YES!!! to conflict
and YES!!! to being angry
YES!!! to kicking ass :)
YES!!! to entering the room as a full being and when the door is too small for that, to break it down

YES!!! to bleeding....a cleanse
and bless the blood that has already been shed! YES!!!
YES!!! to new soil not stained in blood

YES!!! to imagining
YES!!! to exploding the closed circulation of capitalism with love that circulates
YES!!! to open not closed economies, yes to there being ENOUGH for everyone
YES!!! To knowing that there is NO ZERO SUM GAME, you are not required to die so I might live
YES!!! to loving and being loved :)

YES!!!! to  LIFE!!! YOUR LIFE, MY LIFE, OUR LIVES!!!
YES!! to FAITH in YES!
YES!!!

3 Big Decades-->3 Tiny Books of Poetry by Alexis Pauline Gumbs

I've decided to celebrate 30 years of being a teeny tiny poet by amplifying my poetic work in a big grown up way.

You now (only until the end of June) have the opportunity to buy one, or two or three or several tiny origami folded poetry books by yours truly as part of my fundraiser to publish my chapbook Such Rainbows a series of love poems to my inspired community edited by Mai'a Williams!  Poetry for poetry's sake indeed!
These teeny tiny books of poetry that has never been published anywhere before are perfect for your pocket, for a gift or for a fabulous fan during this hot hot summer!

Donate $5 for one little book, $10 for 2 little books and $14 to take three little books all the way home.  Be sure to specify which books you want and your current address!!!
Black Poetry
A big claim for a tiny book right?

Enjoy some strong impact small poems inspired by Phillis Wheatley, Kanye West, Saidiya Hartman, Countee Cullen, Margaret Danner and the blackest things you know, like the ocean at night and wrought iron.


 




After Dark: Remix Haikus for June
This series of remix haikus based on June Jordan's Things That I Do in the Dark is a deep breath.  A to do list. A prayer in a darkroom, a black feminist afterglow.   The perfect thing to read this June.




 




 Harlem Sidewalk Monument
to Straight Hair Gone Forever
This experiment is a memorial to the over-rated straightness of a girl born crooked.   A series of intentional square poems engage the anthropology of Zora Neale Hurston, steam of a Dominican hair salon, breakdancing, cardboard and the undead Aaliyah.  Yes.

Eternal Summer Potluck Series Continues with Samiya Bashir's GOSPEL

By popular demand we bring you back the series that started it all…the Eternal Summer of the Black Feminist Mind Potluck series!

Sunday June 17th
5pm
at Inspiration Station 2 (email brokenbeautifulpress@gmail.com for directions)


Continuing our 2012 focus on contemporary poetry we will be focusing on Samiya Bashir's GOSPEL:


Brilliant poet, educator and smiling visitation of sunshine Samiya Bashir's poetry rocks in your heart whether you read it with your eyes or your mouth.  There is something so Sunday-perfect and sanctuary ironic about these poems that you will not want to miss this session!  Read Lex's overjoyed review of Bashir's Gospel here: http://blackademics.org/2009/05/18/independent-black-gay-and-lesbian-publisher-redbone-press-presents-gospel-by-samiya-bashir/

The Eternal Summer of the Black Feminist Mind Potluck Series is a never-ending series of delicious gatherings celebrating, lifting up, studying and utilizing the legacy of Black feminist thought to save our lives and transform our communities in Durham, NC (and in your community if you choose to read along!)   All people who are excited to be transformed by the brilliance of Black feminists are welcome to this child-inclusive space!