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 work1, 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 Collective2 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.
- See Andrea Smith, “Feminism Without Bureaucracy, Beyond Inclusion, Re-centering Feminism,” Left Turn 28 (2008); Also see The Abolitionist’s interview with Andrea Smith (PDF); and The Boarding School Healing Project. [↩]
- Combahee River Collective, “A Black Feminist Statement,” In All the Women are White, All the Blacks are Men, But Some of Us are Brave, Gloria T. Hull Ed. (Old Westbury, NY: Feminist Press, 1982): 13-22. [↩]
