Becoming A People
Wendi O’Neal gathers the people during the Southerners on New Ground Anniversary Celebration in Durham, NC
Nobody in my African dance class wants to celebrate President’s Day. “What is there to celebrate?” We collectively believe that the buildings where we dance should be open to us on this municipal holiday. Because as one wise dancer pointed out “There isn’t a president.” The truth of this is glaring at the moment. And the impulse for us to come together and move is ancient and it is as necessary now as it is has ever been.
Last month a group of us came together to write about coming together drawing on the Black Feminist Precedent of June Jordan’s book Living Room. We wrote about what home is and what it isn’t. We revisited the horrifying clarity of the Greensboro Massacre and the Atlanta Child Murders. We thought about the simplicity and complexity of our basic rights. Clean water. Safe living space. We reflected on the difference between making demands for accountability from systems designed to eradicate us and tapping into the actual source of our supply, that which makes the flower bloom. We reclaimed our blooming y’all.
In 1979 in the face of the Atlanta Child Murders, June Jordan asked her community “What kind of a people are we?” She wanted to know if her community would transform itself to save it’s own children. She wanted to ask about a collective capacity to respond ethically in a flagrantly violent context. And we still need that. Our workshop was dedicated to and inclusive of parents facing violent neglect and environmental poisoning in Durham Public Housing. Our basic needs, our fundamental rights will not come from a president. That type of only love can only be activated by a people. When fear threatens to isolate us further, and when our isolation only benefits those few who seek to control the many, we have to learn to become a people. What kind of a people? Our closing group poem from the Living Room workshop offers an invocation. Again this is best read aloud.
P.S. Tomorrow is Audre Lorde’s Birthday aka High Holy Black Feminist Rebirth-day you can sign up for our celebratory workshop Ancestor Audre: References for Rebirth here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/93658770905
And my new book Dub: Finding Ceremony came out last week. On Feb 29/March 1st join us for an intimate 12 person online experience: Undrowned Sun: An Ancestral Listening Intensive. Learn more here: http://brillianceremastered.alexispauline.com/2020/02/09/undrowned-sun-an-ancestral-listening-intensive/
Invocation: For Becoming a People
by the participants in the Living Room: Housing as a Human Right Webinar
“What kind of a people are we?” – June Jordan in “The Test of Atlanta 1979”
a people who put love first
a people who change the world
a people who collectively protect our children
a people who uplift one another
a people who say what they need to say
a people who follow through
a people who seek out all the forbidden lost histories
a people who will not sit idly by
a people who make good food
a people who will give a glass of water
a people who rest
a people who know the material power of dreams
a people who use joy as resistance
a people who use love as our weapon
a people who renourish the soil
a people who drink as we pour
a people who warm each other
a people who ready for birth
a people who sing to our babies
a people who honor our elders
a people who pay attention to the moon
a people who LISTEN TO BLACK WOMEN
a people who engage in sustainable support and care
a people who actively heal generational trauma
a people who remembers our medicine
a people who know we need each other and say it out loud
a people who abolish the prisons
a people who restore and repair
a people who love learning
in the living room
