Even This: Generating Survival — Alexis Pauline Gumbs

Last Thursday, some of us, those of us who could access electricity and battery power gathered for a digital writing workshop on energy and transformation. We gathered to remember Audre Lorde’s wisdom on the relationship between natural and social disasters, based her experience revising her whole lifetime of poetry by candle and kerosene lamp and listening for the generator to cut off in the months after Hurricane Hugo when St. Croix, a colonial territory of the United States, had no electrical power, just one demonstration of an ongoing lack of accountability. We gathered with Puerto Rico on our minds. During the aftermath of Hurricane Hugo, Audre Lorde was terminally ill and we gathered with disability justice warriors on our minds who raised awareness about the impact of California’s pre-emptive power outages during the wildfires on those members of our communities who depend on electricity to live. We were vulnerable with each other and explored the rawness of the interruptions not only in our access to utilities, but in our relationships, our practices, our interrupted sleep, our anxiety. We cataloged our longings and following the lead of Audre Lorde, engaged revision. We moved through the past tense, subjunctive, tense, present tense, inspired by Lorde’s practice later in her life of putting line breaks within lines, we made space for ourselves to breathe. We let ourselves learn about the relationship between interruption and reconnection. Space between, and space to generate something new and necessary. Some interruptions are sudden, some are recurring. Audre Lorde reminds us that “wind is our teacher,” in the forms of elemental changes that prove the illusion of the status quo, the structures that operate as if the world is not changing right now.

Our offering to you is a group poem we created inspired by Audre Lorde’s poem “The Winds of Orisha” a reflection on what the edges of our experiences are teaching us about expansive contradiction, persistence and adaptation. We invite you to read it out loud.

P.S. There are still some spots in next week’s online workshop Living Room: Housing as a Human Right, inspired by June Jordan’s poetry collection Living Room and the work of Black mother’s in Durham and the Bay Area to create a homeful reality. More info here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/living-rooma-writing-workshop-on-housing-as-a-human-right-tickets-89969484149

And check out the video below to learn about next weekend’s Black Feminist Speculative Documentary Intensive in Durham: https://documentarystudies.asapconnected.com/CourseDetail.aspx?CourseId=215629

Even This

by the participants in “Of Generators and Survival: Listening for Audre Lorde When the Power’s Out”

“When the winds of Orisha blow

even the roots of grass

quicken.”

-from The Winds of Orisha by Audre Lorde

(revised by Lorde for Undersong in the aftermath of Hurricane Hugo when the power was out for months)

even the hands of children bleed

even the humility of hero is fault

even the perfection of the rose fades

even all that is most true dies

even the bark of the tree feels the mycelium