Evelyn Lynn,
Noemi Y. Molitor,
Cara Page, and
Lamont Sims,
"A Conversation about Southerners on New Ground:
Transformation, Legacy and Movement Building in the U.S. South"
(page 5 of 8)
What does "Spiritual" mean? Holding the Multiplicities
"Being a newcomer to the South by way of New Jersey,
Pennsylvania, and New England, and returning to the lineage of Georgia
Share Croppers and Black Seminole Nation in Coco Beach, Florida, as a
Black queer woman, as an organizer, as a healer/cultural worker and
artist I found refuge and sacred space inside of SONG. They carry the
whole body; allow us to forge our memories, our dreams, our political
thinking, our spiritual survival practices, our collective resiliency.
I have come to SONG as a co-trainer for the SONG Organizing School in my
work as a healing arts practitioner responding to violence and trauma in
our communities and movements seeking to transform the conditions that
allow trauma and violence to persist.
What moves me about SONG is their attention to legacy as an
understanding of political transformation. If we cannot describe what
histories we have come from and what contradictions we hold it will be
harder to tell our truths. The hard truths of violence and abuse in our
family, the targeting and criminalizing of our queer bodies, our black
bodies, our disabled bodies, our many gendered bodies, our immigrant
bodies, our women of color bodies. It is within SONG's principles to
listen to our legacies and hold our truths that we can unfold rage,
disappointment, possibilities and dreams as part of one whole."
—Cara
In our reflections on violence and trauma, Evelyn asserted that
reflection and spirituality have to be core when organizing around
trauma, or a movement might fall apart. The organizational challenge
here was to recognize the realities of trauma and post-traumatic stress,
for individual people and our collective bodies. Scholar and activist
Andrea Smith has also emphasized this need in her
work[3], noting that
political movements often fail to recognize that their members,
marginalized communities, have put a lot of effort and energy into
healing from trauma. We need to realize that as traumatized
organizations and communities, we must tend to post-traumatic stress, to
enable well-being within our activist work, not on top of, or
outside of it. Thus, if a movement does not make space and resources for
this work, it excludes people or makes it hard or impossible for them to
participate.
Cara mentioned that SONG's political work in lifting up healers,
cultural workers and other traditions as inherent to our southern
movement-building creates a place of grace and honor for this lineage of
survival. We used the notion of a collective body to touch on
interconnectedness, on the interconnectivity of SONG as a collective,
which could be as specific as the people of New Orleans post-Katrina
and as wide as all of SONG's membership base. As a collective we can
commit to responsibility and accountability in different ways,
especially when we create an environment and a space people can fully
lean into. As we said, we cannot be asked to hold an organization
without holding down each other. Individually we maybe can exist without
an organization, but the organization could not exist without us. To us,
SONG is an organization that is able to hold the collective and
individual trauma violence creates by giving permission to bring our
whole selves to the work.
In this context we continued more deeply spiritually. Noemi reflected
on the ways in which homophobic, colonial strands of Christianity have
made her very skeptical towards religion, and how certain new-age kinds
of spirituality have been resistant to reflect their problematic
tendencies for cultural appropriation, or cultural appreciation, without
giving back politically. At the same time, "spirituality" to her could
mean allowing oneself to bring emotional understandings to a political
and cultural context, which allows for an analysis of how social
inequalities happen in everyday interpersonal relationships. This lens
asks how social inequalities are woven into commonsense culture and
how these structures can affect our minds and souls, i.e. our
well-being; it also gives space to articulate the way we see the world
and the ways in which we suffer from everyday violence and allows for
healing beyond individual processes.
Evelyn described the permission to bring the longing for spirituality
and its practice as vital in her work. In organizing outside the South,
she has often felt the Left's hostility to organized forms of
spirituality (i.e. Christianity) and those who practice them. Of course,
there are many legitimate reasons to be critical of Christianity. In
addition to its significant contributions to colonialization, the most
visible current practice of Christianity has been appropriated by the
Right. They use it to embody the rationalization for hate, oppression,
and violence and, as a result, many of us have felt alienated and
rejected by our spiritual homes. But Evelyn expressed that being
alienated by the Right and feeling hostility from the Left can cause
people to miss the important connections that justice-focused spiritual
communities can bring: the opportunity for liberatory practice, for
fellowship and community, for deepening our understanding and practice
of the values of love, respect, and kinship. "The church should be ours,
not the Right's," she said. Spirituality can be revolutionary and SONG
seems to embrace this knowledge.
To Cara, spirituality through SONG is about holding the
multiplicities. Cara spoke of SONG's ability to move, inspire, and build
capacity of organizers through spiritual and cultural work. It is
always a space where spiritual practice is given permission to exist as
a central force to our work and vision—without ostracizing or
uplifting one practice or another—just holding a space that connects
us, that honors ancestral work. She evoked a moment in SONG's history
that she described as a turning point in SONG. Like a collective breath,
the resting period that SONG had a few years ago, was used to gather
stories in a Listening Campaign inspired by the Zapatistas Listening
Campaign. To Cara, SONG held a spiritual and political consciousness by
asking SONG members what they dreamed for, what they desired in the
context of history and memory in our southern LBGTQTS communities. Cara
saw this as a spiritual practice and tool in of itself. With the
Listening Campaign, SONG held a reflective moment to find out what it
needed to pay attention to in order to be able to respond to any
internal or external wounds of change in SONG's leadership or history.
SONG asked the members what they needed from each other and from SONG.
This in turn allowed for an organic rebirth of SONG's political work
and vision that came from our movement and community's hearts and
bodies, not just from theory or reaction. Cara also identified
spirituality as being connected to place. For instance when we look at
the name Combahee River Collective[4]
we can see how to place a
Black Lesbian collective and manifesto's name inside of the
physical-geographical name of a river is a spiritual practice in its own
right. In the same vein, SONG, in the spelling of its name (Southerners
on New Ground), seeks to physically reclaim a social, political, and
spiritual ground to the reconnection to southern geography.
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