this is what it sounds like
(an ecological approach)
1.
put your ear to the ground [1]
face sideways your roots [2]
align your dirty rhythmic heart [3]
a yes [4]
deep with centuries of waiting [5]
listen [6]
you may be in danger [7]
(if) you are not extinct [8]
2.
maroon tap break beat [9]
old blood loose [10]
under tongue blade be [11]
time
stolen shared and saved [12]
3.
wake up early [13]
nocturnal animals
and unfinished dreams [14]
scratch your roof morse [15]
(and your throat open) [16]
Footnotes
1. Eternal Summer of the Black Feminist Mind (An Example)
The Eternal Summer of the Black Feminist Mind is based in,
accountable to, and in love with Durham, North Carolina, a
post-industrial southern city in a state with a history of plantation
slavery and a contemporary practice of exploiting and targeting migrant
workers. Something is happening here that has been happening for too
long. Something new is also happening here. [Back to text]
2. Durham, as a city, has a large Black working
class population, a growing Latino population, and also a history of Black
wealth (as defined in the destructive capitalist sense and also as
defined in the subversive sense that Nikki Giovanni proposes in her poem
"Nikki-Rosa": "Black love is Black wealth.") Durham is also a
university city. See the above reference to plantation slavery and
migrant exploitation as context. [Back to text]
3. The ground that nurtures the Eternal Summer
of the Black Feminist Mind's perpetual growth and expression through
media, educational interactions, and interactive research is a
transformative activist and organizing community watered in particular
by the women of color, sex workers, survivors of sexual violence, queer
and gender queer people and allies who created UBUNTU, a coalition
dedicated to ending all gendered violence through the intentional
creation of a communal practice of sustaining transformative love, and
also by a network of collectives, organizations, and projects committed
to racial and economic justice, abolishing the prison industrial
complex, growing community-accountable healthy food sources, an
intersectional approach to queer liberation, and the creation of a
people's Durham led by working class women of color. [Back to text]
4. The Eternal Summer of the Black Feminist
Mind is accountable to these local conditions... [Back to text]
5. and seeks to fortify the loving and dynamic
relationship between contemporary visionaries and the legacy of Black
feminist activism, creativity and thought, specifically through the
creation of ritual educational spaces that invite the participation of
Black feminist ancestors. [Back to text]
6. The premise of the Eternal Summer of the
Black Feminist Mind and its "by every means necessary" approach, is
the belief that Black feminist educators, community organizers, writers,
and scholars are evidence of a spiritual reality, a revised meaning of
life that not only challenges but also implies an alternative to the
deadliness of capitalism. [Back to text]
7. The "Eternal Summer" riffs on and points out
global warming, peak oil, and the cumulative friction of the global
capitalist machine that expends life for profit as evidence that a
different meaning of life is necessary now. [Back to text]
8. The good news, or gospel, of the Eternal
Summer of the Black Feminist Mind is that BLACK FEMINISM LIVES as a
spiritual practice, a political legacy, and a critical intersectional
possibility that people of all backgrounds and experiences have the
opportunity to be transformed by when they get with it. [Back to text]
9. The Eternal Summer of the Black Feminist
Mind is revolutionary because it models what is possible in
community as transformation. In much the way that the very existence of
maroon communities as an alternative space of Black freedom inspired
enslaved Africans trapped on plantations to rise up and rebel, the
Eternal Summer of the Black Feminist Mind, which provides loving
transformative spaces and technologies sustained by the brilliance of
the oppressed genius communities we are accountable to, hopes to inspire
those working for necessary change within the non-profit industrial
complex to remember that we do not need to wait for or pander to
foundation funding or a corporately validated organizational structure
to create what we need. [Back to text]
10. The most radical danger is here in the
already existing genius of oppressed people, constrained by a system
that devalues that genius. [Back to text]
11. We believe that all of that brilliance is
available under the right circumstances. Or as Jamaican theorist Sylvia
Wynter says "the ceremony must be found." ['The Ceremony Must Be Found:
After Humanism' Boundary II, 12:3 & 13:1, (Spring/Fall 1984):
19-70.] [Back to text]
12. Therefore time is the most valued resource
in the ecology of the Eternal Summer of the Black Feminist Mind.
Ancestral time, time as community, intentional time, and time across
space are the forms of time that make the Eternal Summer of the Black
Feminist Mind Eternal. Our time together is sacred. We were never
meant to survive. See Audre Lorde's "A Litany for Survival"
in The Black Unicorn, New York: Norton, 1995 (re-issue).
[Back to text]
13. Ancestral time: This means both
setting intentional time for ancestor attention and an
understanding of time that acknowledges the presence of all the energy
that ever has been. Alexis wakes up at five o'clock in the morning,
when no one else is interested in speaking to her, specifically to
listen for what her long noticed or newly announced ancestors will
demand, suggest, or make known. [Back to text]
14. Kifu Faruq, Eternal Summer of the Black
Feminist Mind participant, sustainer, and community food justice
worker calls this practice being present to the "dream
download." [Back to text]
15. These ancestors often bring specific
instructions, exciting possibilities, and new details for how all of our
dreams are possible. [Back to text]
16. This practice provides a miraculous clarity
to an eternal day. [Back to text]
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