Black Feminist Love Lessons: Continuance
we teeter on the edge. and so remains: the edge. what are we to do with it ?
we dangle on the edge of an inferno, an infinity that is ours to claim. let us reach, then, as Alexis Pauline Gumbs instructs, into “a new and threatening listening.”
it is my Black feminist foremothers i reached for this morning, as is every morning, evermore, to help me understand how and why and where to from here. below is the message i received and the chorus of lightning bolts / small mercies / “torch songs” / and “conspiracies” / it arrived through:
let us understand this decision as yet another signification of how much of our world is seduced and enamored by flagrant displays of dominance and force. let us remember that, as Christina Sharpe writes: while “we are constituted through and by continued vulnerability to this overwhelming force, we are not only known to ourselves and to each other by that force.” let us understand the aftermath of this decision, then, as a critical opportunity to seduce as many people as we possibly can into a politic and practice of interdependence, relation, and an enfleshed understanding that wielding power over another always comes at a cost to yourself.
“There is no end / To what a living world / Will demand of you.” (Octavia Butler, Parable of the Sower): roll up your sleeves for, indeed, this is an infinity that is ours to shape, ours to claim.
“Critique holds fascism as its enemy. … with social and political criticism out of the way, fascism is left to flourish” (Mandy Harris Williams, Critique as Care): sharpen your critiques so as they operate as arrows in the aorta of all that seeks to crush us.
“It can be dangerous to investigate what our lives depend on, to recognize that freedom requires a species-scale betrayal of our founding mythologies” (Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Dub): such mythologies like plantation logic, capitalist agendas, neo-liberalism, ecocide — what are you and yours (she didn’t flinch when she said species-scale) willing to transgress in the name of justice?
“Care as shared risk” (Christina Sharpe, In The Wake): what costs some of us our comfort may very well cost others their lives. who and what are you willing to walk into the blaze for/with/to/against? who and what are you willing to place yourself in the line of fire for?
and a balm: “today we are possible” (Lucille Clifton, birth-day)
from the cradle of interminable love,
Camille