"A story is not a story until it is told; it is not told until it is heard; once it is heard, it changes—and becomes more open to the beauties or frailties of more change; or: a story is not a story until it changes. Indeed, until it changes or it changes someone else, until it becomes part of the vital histories of change it recounts."

— Della Pollock on the Marian Cheek Center for Making and Saving History

OUT OF BREATH

"If in classical modernity people could imagine their lives in intergenerational terms—say, the same firm passing down through a bourgeois family—in late capitalism, turnover is so accelerated that it becomes hard to imagine one's life course even within a few years, let alone a few generations. This in turn drives a sense of the acceleration of the "pace of life," the psychological feeling of always being out of breath—which in turn drives the desire for more labor-saving technology, and technical change...For Rosa, modernity is defined by a continual sense of the present contracting—a feeling that what one is able to do within a given time frame is shrinking. The feeling comes about because the variety of social experiences available is ceaselessly proliferating: the number of things you might be able to do becomes impossibly large, and expands every day with implacable speed." 

 

— "Too Fast, Too Furious," N+1 Winter 2015

SISTER STORIES

"Our histories never unfold in isolation. We cannot truly tell what we consider to be our own histories without knowing the other stories. And often we discover that those other stories are actually our own stories. This is the admonition "Learn your sisters' stories" by Black feminist sociologist Jaqui Alexander. This is a dialectical process that requires us to constantly retell our stories, to revise them and retell them and relaunch them. We can thus not pretend that we do not know about the conjunctures of race and class and ethnicity and nationality and sexuality and ability. "

— Angela Davis, "Transnational Solidarities" 

HOW 

"Let me be clear: I believe it is my political and ethical responsibility to counter white supremacy explicitly and purposefully, in my creative work and in my teaching and in my cross-language practice and in my everyday conversations and movements through the world—and I don’t actually make much distinction among those realms, in practice or in poetics. I believe, further, that white supremacy is inextricably and intersectionally bound up with heteropatriarchy and voracious capitalism and the kind of anthropocentric consumer mentality that allows humans with privilege to believe that they are somehow immune from the ecological interconnectedness of all living beings (human, fauna, and flora). These are my beliefs, and I work to enact them in multiple ways in multiple contexts, and I often fail, and I continue through failure, and I don’t seek success but rather I seek accountability, porosity, to encounter what is beyond me, to accompany and be accompanied. These are my beliefs, and yet in the moment, as everyone present was being subjected to Marjorie Perloff’s hate speech—or maybe it was less intentional than hate speech? fear speech, perhaps?—I didn’t speak. I heard something and I didn’t say anything. All too often I don’t quite know how to speak. There’s no how-to for making a work or a life that counters white supremacy, nor is such resistance always as clear-cut as responding directly to racism publicly and blatantly expressed. Poetic practice is rarely clear-cut, direct and blatant; this is, in my view, part of its power: to take the everyday often instrumentalized tool that is language and to defamiliarize it in order to make other imaginings, other instigations, and other structures radically and concretely and imaginatively possible."

— Jen Hofer, "If You Hear Something Say Something,
or if You're Not on the Table, You're on the Menu" 

BE VAST

All she wanted was to find a place to stretch her bones.

A place to lengthen her smiles

and spread her hair

a place where her legs could walk without cutting and bruising

a place unchained.

She was born out of ocean breath.

I reminded her;  ‘Stop pouring so much of yourself into hearts that have no room for themselves

do not thin yourself, be vast.

You do not bring the ocean to a river.’

— Tapiwa Mugabe, "You are Oceanic"

ON LIVING THE QUESTIONS 

"Ultimately what drives us to resolve tension as quickly as we can is the fear that if we hold it too long, it will break our hearts.

This bedrock layer of fear is the one that interests me, for at least two reasons. It evokes more sympathy in me, for myself and others, than the ego's fear of looking bad or losing out, which seems whiny and pathetic. And the heart's fear of being broken is not fanciful: holding powerful tensions over time can be, and often is, a heartbreaking experience. 

But there are at least two ways to understand what it means to have our hearts broken. One is to imagine the heart broken into shards and scattered about—a feeling most of us know, and a fate we would like to avoid. The other is to imagine the heart broken open into new capacity—a process that is not without pain but one that many of us would welcome. As I stand in the tragic gap between reality and possibility, this small, tight fist of a thing called my heart can break open into greater capacity to hold more of my own and the world's suffering and joy, despair and hope." 

 

— Parker Palmer, A Hidden Wholeness

BEING EMPTY

"I have traveled this country extensively and have met many people. Rarely have I met people with the overweening sense of self the moralists say we have, people who put themselves first as if they possessed the divine right of kings. 

Instead, I have met too many people who suffer from an empty self. They have a bottomless pit where their identity should be—an inner void they try to fill with competitive success, consumerism, sexism, racism, or anything that might give them the illusion of being better than others. We embrace attitudes and practices such as these not because we regard ourselves as superior but because we have no sense of self at all. Putting others down becomes a path to identity, a path we would not need to walk if we knew who we were. 

The moralists seem to believe that we are in a vicious circle where rising individualism and the self-centeredness inherent in it cause the decline of community—and the decline of community, in turn, gives rise to more individualism and self-centeredness. The reality is quite different, I think: as community is torn apart by various political and economic forces, more and more people suffer from the empty self syndrome. 

A strong community helps people develop a sense of true self, for only in community can the self exercise and fulfill its nature: giving and taking, listening and speaking, being, and doing. But when the community unravels and we lose touch with one another, the self atrophies and we lose touch with ourselves as well. Lacking opportunities to be ourselves in a web of relationships, our sense of self disappears, leading to behaviors that further fragment our relationships and spread the epidemic of inner emptiness. 

As I view our society through the lens of my journey with depression—an extreme form of the empty self syndrome, an experience of self-annihilation just short of death—I am convinced that the moralists have got it wrong: it is never "selfish" to name, claim, and nurture true self. 

There are selfish acts, to be sure. But those acts arise from an empty self, as we try to fill our emptiness in ways that harm us and bring grief to those who care about us. When we are rooted in true self, we can act in ways that are life-giving for us and all whose lives we touch. Whatever we do to care for the true self is, in the long run, a gift to the world. 

— Parker Palmer, A Hidden Wholeness: The Journey Toward an Undivided Life

 

BROKEN TONGUES

I have always been conscious of my battling tongues,
of being too assimilated
to speak my mother’s language,
the rejection of English because of my brown skin.
Sometimes, I want to refuse
to speak,
refuse my mouth movement;
conscious, it might be too ugly for either side to hear.

I remember something Celia Cruz once said,
in all her colorful outfits,
with sweet courage of AZCUCAR!
“My English is not very good lookiiiing
but I am very glad to say that.”

She has
an unapologetic accent.
Point blank—
Her English is not very good looking.
In one brave line,
her less than classic beauty
has no pity
but has
the ganas to be a good looking pure badass mami.

                                                                       Esa muxer tiene tumbao!

And for all the Spanglish—
can’t find the correct words in Spanish/English
pochx mamis,
Celia speaks to us.

                                                                       Porque si tenemos tumbao!

Fuck the:
“Wow, you speak English really good!”
Or
“Do you know why Spanish is so important?”
Or
“Shame on your mother for not teaching you Spanish.”

—No te jodas con eso—

Check them with:
Yes, I speak English well, not good,
to answer your grammatically incorrect statement;
I’m not trying to be anyone’s token.
Yes, I know Spanish is important,
my skin is a constant reminder
that language is always trying to e r  a  s   e            m      e
and my mother was trying to preserve me,
don’t shun her for showing me how to survive.

Our broken tongues do not need to fall apart
because of pinche pendejxs.

Our language lives in-between
constantly being misunderstood
and lost in translation.

No, I will not apologize for my incorrect Spanish,
—pinche pendejxs—
I am reclaiming what was taken
and wounds take time to heal.

No, I am not trying to be white,
—pinche pendejxs—
English was my first language,
so don’t call me a coconut
like it will crack me open,
find me hollow.

See me like Celia—
Colorful outfits,
sweet AZUCAR!
rolling off my tongue.
Mixing sugar and salt to recreate flavors
from recipes
trial and error.

Celia, I want my tongue to be good looking like yours
—porque mi español no te mires bien tambien.

Pero muxeres,
there will always be people
not wanting to hear
how good looking we are.

 

— "Good Looking,"  Raquel “Raqui” Torres 

DREAMING IN GUJARATI

The children in my dreams speak in Gujurati
turn their trusting faces to the sun
say to me
care for us nurture us
in my dreams I shudder and I run.
I am six
in a playground of white children
Darkie, sing us an Indian song!

Eight
in a roomful of elders
all mock my broken Gujurati
English girl! 
Twelve, I tunnel into books
forge an armor of English words.

Eighteen, shaved head
combat boots - 
shamed by masis
in white saris
neon judgments
singe my western head.

Mother tongue. 
Matrubhasha
tongue of the mother
I murder in myself.

Through the years I watch Gujurati
swell the swaggering egos of men
mirror them over and over
at twice their natural size.

Through the years
I watch Gujurati dissolve
bones and teeth of women, break them
on anvils of duty and service, burn them
to skeletal ash.

Words that don’t exist in Gujurati: 
Self-expression. 
Individual. 
Lesbian.

English rises in my throat
rapier flashed at yuppie boys
who claim their people “civilized” mine. 
Thunderbolt hurled
at cab drivers yelling
Dirty black bastard! 
Force-field against teenage hoods
hissing
Fucking Paki bitch! 
Their tongue - or mine? 
Have I become the enemy?

Listen: 
my father speaks Urdu
language of dancing peacocks
rosewater fountains
even its curses are beautiful. 
He speaks Hindi
suave and melodic
earthy Punjabi
salty rich as saag paneer
coastal Kiswahili
laced with Arabic, 
he speaks Gujurati
solid ancestral pride.

Five languages
five different worlds
yet English
shrinks
him
down
before white men
who think their flat cold spiky words
make the only reality.

Words that don’t exist in English: 
Najjar
Garba
Arati.

If we cannot name it
does it exist? 
When we lose language
does culture die? What happens
to a tongue of milk-heavy
cows, earthen pots
jingling anklets, temple bells, 
when its children
grow up in Silicon Valley
to become
programmers?

Then there’s American: 
Kin’uh get some service? 
Dontcha have ice? 
Not: 
May I have please? 
Ben, mane madhath karso? 
Tafadhali nipe rafiki
Donnez-moi, s’il vous plait
Puedo tener…..

Hello, I said can I get some service?! 
Like, where’s the line for Ay-mericans
in this goddamn airport?

Words that atomized two hundred thousand Iraqis: 
Didja see how we kicked some major ass in the Gulf? 
Lit up Bagdad like the fourth a’ July! 
Whupped those sand-niggers into a parking lot!

The children in my dreams speak in Gujurati
bright as butter
succulent cherries
sounds I can paint on the air with my breath
dance through like a Sufi mystic
words I can weep and howl and devour
words I can kiss and taste and dream
this tongue
I take
back.

 

— Shailja Patel, Migritude

MOBILE CAPITAL + IMMOBILE RACE

"So much good has come from modernity: freedoms of the mind, and of the stomach. It is hard to look back at older ways of being with nostalgia. Things were hard in the old days. And yet, with the modern came some brutal social forms, one of which was the scientific linkage of blood to belonging. Caste and bondage has along history, a brutal past that leaks into the uncomfortable present. Those older social oppressions are now married to the technology of the modern State, whose capacity to measure, to count, to conduct surveillance and police its borders, is far more efficient than that of the pre-modern State. It is this linkage between older ideas and new technologies that  makes migration of the past so different from migration of the present. 

'Immigration,' as a concept, is born in the era of imperialism. 'Immigrants,' in this context, are not just those who cross boundaries, but those who pointedly enter the advanced industrial states from lands of dusky skin. Immigration is always already about mobile capital and immobile race. Colonial rulers went where they willed, and they even moved people from one colony to another; but the colonized were not to be fully welcome in the heartlands of the empire, in Europe, in the United States. If they came, they were allowed in for their labor, not for their lives, Those Indian traders in Africa would become foreigners, not just outsiders. Racism would overwhelm older forms of xenophobia." 

— Vijay Prashad, Foreword to Shailja Patel's Migritude

WHAT YOUR PROBLEM IS

"And so, you say, you've learned a little
about starvation: a child like a supper scrap
filling with worms, many children strung
together, as if they were cut from paper
and all in a delicate chain. And that people
who rescue physicists, lawyers and poets
lie in their beds at night with reports
of mice introduced into women, of men
whose testicles are crushed like eggs.
That they cup their own parts
with their bedsheets and move themselves
slowly, imagining bracelets affixing
their wrists to a wall where the naked
are pinned, where the naked are tied open
and left to the hands of those who erase
what they touch. We are all erased
by them, and no longer resemble decent
men. We no longer have the hearts, 
the strength, the lives of women. 
Your problem is not your life as it is
in America, not that your hands, as you
tell me, are tied to something. It is
that you were born to an island of greed
and grace where you have this sense
of yourself as apart from others. It is
not your right to feel powerless. Better
people than you were powerless. 
You have not returned to your country,
but to a life you never left. "

                                                                                             — Carolyn Forché,  "The Return," The Country Between Us

 

DIVINE DISSATISFACTION

"I confessed that I had a burning desire to be excellent, but no faith that I could be.

Martha said to me, very quietly: 'There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and it will be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is nor how valuable nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open. You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep yourself open and aware to the urges that motivate you. Keep the channel open. As for you, Agnes, you have so far used about one-third of your talent.'

'But,' I said, 'when I see my work I take for granted what other people value in it. I see only its ineptitude, inorganic flaws, and crudities. I am not pleased or satisfied.'

'No artist is pleased.'

'But then there is no satisfaction?'

'No satisfaction whatever at any time,' she cried out passionately. 'There is only a queer divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others.'"

— Agnes de Mille, Martha: The Life and Work of Martha Graham 

 

THE SHORT/LONG GAME

"People live in the present. Everybody has to eat today, not tomorrow. Everybody has to sleep today, not tomorrow. Everybody has to do all those ordinary things today, and you can't tell people that they have to just wait another five or ten or twenty years, and it's going to get better somehow. Indeed that was a line of a lot of the historic antisystemic movements: "It will be better tomorrow; the sunshine is beyond the horizon." So you've got to worry about today, but you can't only worry about today. 

The problem is working out a strategy that combines a very short-run, immediate attempt to solve people's needs and a medium-run strategy of transforming the system. I think of the very short run as one of minimizing the pain. Minimizing the pain can be done in a thousand different ways. Some of it requires government action. Some of it requires popular action. But people need to have less pain immediately, and there are all sorts of ways of doing that. That doesn't transform the world, but it does meet people's needs." 

— Immanuel Wallerstein,  with Grace Lee Boggs at the US Social Forum, 2010

 

 

SAY MORE PLEASE

"There is a pervasive form of contemporary violence to which the idealist most easily succumbs: activism and overwork. The rush and pressure of modern life are a form, perhaps the most common form, of its innate violence. To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything, is to succumb to violence. The frenzy of our activism neutralizes our work for peace. It destroys our own inner capacity for peace. It destroys the fruitfulness of our own work, because it kills the root of inner wisdom which makes work fruitful."

— Thomas Merton

REMEMBERING: GRACE LEE BOGGS
 

"History is not the past. It is the stories we tell about the past. How we tell these stories—triumphantly or self-critically, metaphysically or dialectically—has a lot to do with whether we cut short or advance our evolution as human beings." 

— Grace Lee Boggs

GATHER YOURSELF

"How do you get from connection to isolation? You end up isolated if you don't cultivate the capacity for solitude, the ability to be separate, to gather yourself. Solitude is where you find yourself so that you can reach out to other people and form real attachments. When we don't have the capacity for solitude, we turn to other people in order to feel less anxious or in order to feel alive. When this happens, we're not able to appreciate who they are. It's as though we're using them as spare parts to support our fragile sense of self."

— Jane Porter, "How Solitude Can Change Your Brain in Profound Ways"

REVOLUTION 

"Reading between lines of the FBI's individual reports on Baker's activities, one can almost hear the agents' queries, pregnant with all the biased stereotypes the agency held about dissidents: What is she up to? Who does she work for? What is her hidden agenda? The agents' own inability to answer such basic questions led one of them to conclude that Baker was "unstable." It was the very way that she looked at the world that made her so difficult to label. Since she saw revolution as a process, as a living experiment in creative vision and collaboration, very little, in her opinion, could be pre-determined. No blueprint could be rigidly adhered to. There was an organic interaction between the people involved in social change and those opposed; among different sectors, generations, and regions of the movement; between what we know and what we dare to dream. Although Baker had a definite worldview, which she articulated, enacted, and defended, there was fluidity and flexibility in the positions she took and the alliances she formed. Even the FBI could not pin her down."

— Barbara Ransby, Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A National Democratic Vision

FINDING NEW (S)HEROES

"Somewhere along the way she recognized that her goal was not a single 'end' but rather an ongoing 'means,' that is, a process. Radical change for Ella Baker was about a presistent and protracted process of discourse, debate, consensus, reflection, and struggle. If larger and larger numbers of communities were engaged in such a process, she reasoned, day in and day out, year after year, the revolution would be well under way. Ella Baker understood that laws, structures, and institutions had to change in order to correct injustice and oppression, but part of the process had to involve oppressed people, ordinary people, infusing new meanings into the concept of democracy and finding their own individual and collective power to determine their lives and shape the direction of history. These were the radical terms that Ella Baker thought in and the radical ideas she found for with her mind and her body. Just as the 'end' for her was not a scripted utopia but another phase of struggle, the means of getting there was not scripted either. Baker's theory of social change and political organizing was inscribed in her practice. Her ideas were written in her work: a coherent body of lived text spanning nearly sixty years." 

— Barbara Ransby, Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision

NOT IMPRESSED

"As Karen Olsen and Linda Shopes note, in our sensitivities to inequalities, academics may 'overestimate our own privilege, even our own importance, in the eyes of the people we interview.' But in fact, most interviewees, they observe, 'seem not especially overwhelmed, intimidated, or impressed with us at all.'" 

— Pamela Sugiman, "I Can Hear Lois Now"