Here are some shots of the crowd and panel for the Bridge tribute. The marvelous of the evening could not be caputured, accurately.

Tribute panel to “This Bridge Called My Back”

Daisy Hernandez

AnaLouise Keating

Maria del Carmen Ochoa

veronica precious bohanan, left
camil willliams, right

Tonight held the session I had been waiting for with curiosity. A Tribute Panel, Bridge Inscriptions: Radical Women of Color Envision – Pasts, Presents, Futures.

Basically, it was a worship session for This Bridge Called My Back.

The panelists were all invited to speak on how this book affected their lives. And while I walked in with no expectations, I left with a similar sensation in my bones as when I left Detroit: spirited, energized, and in community.

There’s just something about when women of color get together. I swear, it’s something in the air.

The panel was comprised of Aquamoon, a two women artistic team, camill williams and veronica precious bohanan; Daisy Hernandez from colorlines magazines (also co-editor of Colonize This!); AnaLouise Keating from Texas Woman’s University; and Maria del Carmen Ochoa from San Jose State University.

What can I say? It was had the most diverse crowd, moving words, and spirited audience. (Don’t you love when the panel is speaking about the different oppressed populations and a moved audience member yells, “And don’t forget the mother of Jesus!” Ahh, the laughter)

As they paid tribute, I jotted a few of their gems:

Moderator began with this statement, “Our poetry, prose, and theory…for women of color, it is all the same.”

Gems from Daisy Hernandez
I found the stories that you never read in school, you meet women on the page.
I once thought that feminism was making poetry out of shame.
Cherrie Moraga said, ‘In my dreams, I am met at the river,’ and it is because of you I am always at the river.
The ‘bridge’ may not be the most suitable metaphor anymore. We don’t cross the bridge to meet all these different people because they all already met on iChat.
We’re not a bridge, but a crossroads, a place where two roads meet and multiply. A place of ritual, sacrifice, choice, conflict. Racism looks different here, we hold imposing powers.

Gems from AnaLouise Keating
Feminism is not a white thing. We. Are. Feminists.
Spiritual Activism is not religion, it is a holistic approach to plitics and transformation. It is the belief that there is more to existence than the embodied world and the spirit infuses it. We are all connected and are accountable for the people down the street, across the border, across the seas.
It is not based on sameness, not about walking in a straight line.
Feminism must stretch to an unseen place.

Gems from Maria del Carmen Ochoa
We must revisit Bridge because of its ability to subvert. From this book we learned how to learn from both critical and creative works.
It is a writing from the lungs. The heart is what usually recieves the metaphorical attention, but the lungs is what takes in air. And we must not forget what the other word is for inhale: inspiration.
Writing=Breathing=Living
We are the changer and the changed.
From Toni Morrison, ‘The function of freedom is to free someone else.’

There are no selective gems from AquaMoon. I can only describe it as one of the most transparent illustrations of talent and brilliance I have ever seen in person. They embrace hip-hop, “will never leave it,” and use it to analyze, poeticize, and create a space for discourse. They rap, sing, make melody out of works. They are human song. They are shine. My only regret in watching the room stand for them is the rest of the world just missed the sky turn gold. In the presence of true artists, individuals who polish their craft, nothing brings me closer to Spirit, than true artists and their work.

The umbilical cord connecting Cisneros to this session was the outcry against a failing healthcare system. Gloria Anzaldua died from diabetes, a dangerous and complicated, but treatable disease. What Cisneros said the previous night about taking care of writers while they are ALIVE is bitter. Had Anzaldua lived, we know she would have been there that night. And it was mentioned again on the panel.

We invoked Anzaldua and all the pioneering women of color who laid down their bodies as the Bridge, no les olvides!

The 2007 NWSA keynote speaker was Sandra Cisneros, a Chicana writer who bases her writing in her life, personal relationships, and Latin@ culture. Her poetry seductive, her prose inquisitive into family secrecy, Cisneros spoke for nearly three and a half hours.

In the span of over three hours, she spanned topics of women of color writing, the writing process, and then shared some of her temporarily unpublished work. Her unmistakable reverence for Gloria Anzaldua was hard to miss, often commenting, “Had we taken better care of her, had a better health care system, Gloria would be here instead of me. She was better with words, theory, and vision. She should be here, not me.”

Here are some of her beautiful fireworks that lasted for hours:

We need to take care of writers who suffer from depression and self-destruction.
Some audience members, non-writers I assume, laugh at this, thinking she is joking. She replies:

No, I’m serious. Writers, women of color writers aren’t seen as real writers…[we have] all the times we doubted ourselves.

My brother asked me, ‘how do you remember those things?’ I said, ‘How do you forget?’

There is no “in sum” for Cisneros. Her voice, girl like in delivery, was light but flexible. Sometimes she spoke imitating her characters, pushing them alive. Cisneros loved word, opening depression, and sex. Unashamed, she bares. This was the last note I had scribbled in my notes about listening to this gifted storyteller:

She spoke. If you close your eyes or lose your gaze into the floor, her voice could have been the one in your own head or tuning in to her ponderings aloud, lifted. Like a cloud, her thoughts thickening around me.

I only took notes for the first 10 minutes of this session. I have much to write about these particular hours, which I will post in a separate piece.

Creating Conversations to Dismantle Racism and White Privilege in Our Women’s Centers and the
NWSA Women’s Centers Committee

Utilizing vignettes from The Way Home, taping of conversations about counsels of women; indigenous groups: AA, Euro, multi, asian, arab, latino, jewish

Importance of getting to our personal edges
Engaging looks different if you are a white woman or a woman of color
Hold the space that the experience is different
Even though it is time limited; it is imperative to continue the conversation, emphasizing the word “continuing”

How do we balance talking with “doing” with being an anti-racist women’s center community?

Ground rules/Ways that we want to be with one another
Do not get lost in critiquing the video or someone else’s experience

Just because you understand racism and sexism in one part, doesn’t mean you understand it in all parts

Own your privilege; how does it serve alliances

Resisting the desire to interrupt and bringing it back to yourself
Building on the stories on one other person’s stories
Acknowledge what has been said before you

 

Grace Lee Boggs was everywhere during the AMC conference. Cursing my lack of confidence, I felt too shy to approach her. This is Grace Lee Boggs. GRACE Lee Boogs. Grace Lee BOGGS.Yep, no matter how I said it myself, I was completely overwhelmed by her life’s work.

Twice, she caught me staring at her and her 91 year old frame shifted to smile directly into my face and I uttered a very eloquent, “Hello, Grace.” It was as if she could read my nervousness and was trying to tell me to calm down; that we’re all human.

Similar to when Sarah Weddington approached and thanked me for volunteering at a democratic fundraiser or when I met Rebecca Walker – it was electric.

It’s not celebrity-hood, or even that I completely agree with individual politics and activism. It’s about being in the presence of someone who has given their life or an enormous chunk of it standing up, defending a cause, raising awareness. That commitment is surreal. That fortitude is immeasureable, their spirit uncontained.

But, Grace. GRACE Lee Boggs.

That was something extraordinary.

The wonderful Fire Fly will be hosting. Submit! Submit! Talk! Say it! Express!

VIA

There are still a couple of weeks to go before the second Carnival of Radical Action goes up! And it’ll be hosted right here at She Who Stumbles. The first one was so great that we want to do it all over again and bring you another… and another, and another… and many more to come!

Here are the guidelines from the first carnival:

The Carnival of Radical Action

Most of us are organizers or activists in our real lives. Or at the very least, we think about it an awful lot and wish we had the skills and/or knowledge to organize. But contrary to the images of protest that make front pages and cause our hearts to swell–actual organizing is not as easy as it looks–nor is it very glamorous.

More often than not, the process it takes to actually get to the glamorous protest part is boring, tedious, filled with infighting, or done by one or two overburdened people who haven’t quite figured out how to say no.

And yet, the organizing part is so vitally important to achieving liberation (whatever that may be). It was through tons and tons of grass roots organizing and hard work that the right managed to come to power in the U.S. the way it has. The Zapatistas and the U.S. based Civil Rights movement both also have a history of achieving goals towards liberation through grassroots organizing.

So how does one go about doing this grassroots organizing?

That’s what this carnival is all about. I will be accepting any posts/submissions that have anything to do with organizing on a grassroots level. Some topic ideas that you might feel inclined to think about:

How do you do radical leftist organizing in the Midwest [or wherever you are]? How do you confront racism/sexism/disableism/homophobia/classism etc within your group? How do you work with a community instead of on a community? How do you confront accessibility issues (that is, you’re all working class mothers and there’s rarely a time to meet or the site where you meet is not wheelchair accessible etc)? What’s been the major problem/setback your group has faced? How did it over come it? What has been a successful tactic in your organizing (for example, you found that taking pictures of violent cops and posting them online is more successful in stopping the abuse than reporting them to their superiors)? If you’re a life time activist, what are some problems you see today with organizing compared to when you first started? Or, if you’ve never organized before, write about why you never have.

This carnival will be about sharing strategies more than finding a “right” answer. In the world we face today where there are so many intersecting forms of oppression, one answer will not fit every community. But something that worked for one community might work for another if they alter it and adjust it to suit their own needs.

I’d like to add that we don’t have a fixed definition of “radical” here. By radical we don’t necessarily mean revolutionary, and we don’t exclude revolutionary action either. Rather, I would say that this carnival is about an emergent definition of radical that comes out of the organising and activism that people undertake, rather than a pre-existing definition that can be applied across contexts. This is about elaborating the process of change, and empowering people to take part in it through blogging. (In that sense, what I’m doing right now is radical too!)

Unfortunately this means we do have to exclude some things. There are fine lines to be drawn between individual action and collective action. One person can make a difference, but we’re talking about intervention into broad social processes that affect a whole range of people, especially oppressed people. Talking about those processes isn’t enough either — we want to know how to change them!

Moreover, this carnival was started by women of colour who have a strong commitment to empowering woc through blogging. This blog is a safe space for woc, and I have a responsibility to other woc to keep it that way. As such, anything that is implicitly or explicitly harmful to woc interests won’t be accepted.

The deadline for submissions is June 21st.

I live in Australia, which makes the time difference tricky. Sydney is 13-15 hours ahead of most places in North America. So the carnival deadline is June 21st, but the carnival will go up a day or two later, according to local time here.

I know quite a few people are going along to the Allied Media Conference, which is from June 22 to 24. I chose the date to give everyone who’s going a chance to submit something to the carnival before they leave. We’re hoping to organise a post-AMC edition of the carnival that rounds up all the live-blogging and conference reports that people write! (If you want to volunteer to host that edition of the carnival, let me know via email.)

You can email me with your submission or use the BlogCarnival.com submission form.

Looking forward to seeing all your posts!

An interesting focus on gender and transgender issues in Newsweek.

Thanks to enough people who created enough uproar, this image was pulled from Dolce and Gabbana who did not think it would be viewed as promoting violence against women.

Notice the BYSTANDER issues here? The objectification? Fantasy rape? The CLEAR as day problems with these images? Sometimes I must remember that the fashion industry is run by humans who, oftentimes, are idiots.

To answer some questions, here is what I’ve been multi-reading:

For Inspiration
Sister Outsider by Audre Lorde
Wounds of Passion by bell hooks
Colonize This! edited by Daisy Hernandez

For Debate Purposes
Full, Frontal Feminism by Jessica Valenti
Manifesta by Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards

On Deck
Essential Neruda edited by Mark Eisner

Fridays are really just invisible partitions, a long line at your favorite rollercoaster, extra John Handcocks on forms before you receive cash. Fridays are fillers that make you wait before you get what you really want: time, freedom, and doing whatever you want.

I will spend Fridays very deliberately from now on. I will be choosing one significant issue and exploring it into the ground. Perhaps it will be trivial or something of the dead-serious variety. We shall see.

I’ll check back soon. I need time to select.