Bootcamp Podcast: The Sound of Mothering Ourselves

Loved ones!!!! For those of you who didn't get to participate in the MotherOurselves Bootcamp in Durham NC this January here is a podcast featuring the insights of the participants and some beautiful music!!! Playlist below.

[audio http://brokenbeautiful.files.wordpress.com/2011/02/bootcamp-podcast-1.mp3]

direct link: http://brokenbeautiful.files.wordpress.com/2011/02/bootcamp-podcast-1.mp3

Also know that for the next week...if you become an Eternal Summerian (monthly sustainer of the Eternal Summer of the Black Feminist Mind) your first gifts will be a mixtape of the meditations of release we did during the bootcamp and the motherourselves manual so that you can bring this work into your life and your community!!!

We can make something out of anything.

Insight from Mariel Eaves and

The Revenge of Ricky Williams "Sweet Wolf Shirt"

We recognize and nurture the creative parts of each other without always understanding what will be created.

"Dear Mom" by Adele Nieves and

Climbing Poetree "I Wonder"

We establish authority over our own definitions.

Affirmations from Miya Binta

Doria Roberts "Dying Man's Wish"

We claim power over who we choose to be, knowing that such power is relative within the realities of our lives.

Estas Mujeres: Covenant by Fabiola Sandoval

Amel Larrieux "All I Got"

We provide an attentive concern and expectation of growth, which is the beginning of that acceptance we came to expect only from our mothers.

"When I Crave Mama" by Fabiola Sandoval

Me'shell Ndegeocello "Solomon"

We affirm our own worth by committing ourselves to our own survival in our selves and in the selves of other black women.

"I Am My Mother's Daughter" by Rashida James-Saadiya

Lauryn Hill "If They Only Knew"

We refuse to settle for anything less than a rigorous pursuit of the possible in ourselves, at the same time making a distinction between what is possible, and what the outside world drives us to do in order to prove that we are human.

"Mother Ourselves" by Julia R. Wallace (JDub)

Santigold "Unstoppable"

We recognize our successes and are tender with ourselves even when we fail.

"My Mother Ourselves Covenant" by Dara Montaque

Res "Bittersweet"

We learn to love what we have given birth to by giving definition to, to be both kind and demanding in the teeth of failure as well as in the face of success without misnaming either.

"Letter of Release to the Next Generation" by Miya Binta

Erykah Badu "My Life"

We lay to rest what is weak, timid and damaged without despisal and we protect and support what is useful for survival. We explore the difference together.

"Mother as Savior" by Miya Binta

Georgia Ann Muldrow "Runway"

We stand toe-to-toe inside rigorous loving and speak what has always seemed like the impossible to each other.

Truth Booth Conversation between Miya Binta and Manju Rajendran

Tata Vega, "Miss Celie's Blues"

As we speak the truth to each other it become unavoidable to ourselves.

ESG "Keep on Moving"

Infinite love,

Lex

MotherOurselves Materials! Gifts for Eternal Summer of the Black Feminist Mind Monthly Sustainers!!!!

Happy January beloved and far-flung supporters of the Eternal Summer of the Black Feminist Mind!!!!!!

Since it is a beautiful new year...we have a beautiful new gift for our beloved Eternal Summerian monthly sustainers! All existing Eternal Summerians and all NEW monthly sustainers who sign up before the end of the month will receive their very own digital copies of crucial priceless curriculum materials from the MotherOurselves Bootcamp:

*The MotherOurselves Manual (including the mother ourselves manifesta, playlist, activity station descriptions and a 5 cycle meditation of release including direct quotes from across Lorde's body of work...especially Eye to Eye: Black Women Hatred and Anger.

*The MotherOurselves Meditation/Dance Party Mixtape: guide yourself or your group through the cycles of meditation and release with music, poetry and the mesmerizing sound of my voice :)

AND Eternal Summerians who sign up at levels of $20 or more will receive hardcopies of both the Manual and the Mixtape (well CD actually) and a one of a kind collage in the mail!!!

Hooray!!!!! Sign up today or on payday! Thank you for making another year of ETERNAL inspiration possible!!!!

Love,

Lex

Don't Leave Your Friends Behind #4 is here!

Don’t Leave Your Friends Behind #4

The latest issue of Don’t Leave Your Friends Behind is ready for your wintertime reading! Featuring over 70 pages of stories, experiences and tips on how to support families in your movement or community, including:

• Experiencing Critical Resistance 10 through the Children’s Program
• Organizing from within an Anarcha-Feminist Childrearing Collective
• Mothers Among Us: The Prison Birth Project
• A Mother’s Day of action with Young Women United and Mamas of Color Rising
• On Fear & Commitments: A father’s reflects on his own childhood in England, Baghdad and the U.S. and the challenges of raising a biracial child in the anti-Muslim and xenophobic climate of the United States today.
• Call to Destiny: how even an early morning wake-up call can support students with special needs
• Radical childrearing with a queer and sex-positive angle
• Tips on supporting pregnant friends
• Tips on supporting parents who have lost a newborn infant
• Radical Childcare Weather Report: a centerfold from the “Building an Intergenerational Movement for Collective Liberation” workshop at the 2010 US Social Forum

and much, much more

A pdf of these exciting 70+ pages is available here:
http://issuu.com/chinabodina/docs/zine_4_with_cover
Please note that the centerfold is a separate file: http://issuu.com/chinabodina/docs/centerfold.zine4

If you prefer a paper copy, please send $3 (or $5 for two and give the second to an ally in your life!) to:

V. Law
PO Box 20388
Tompkins Square Station
New York, NY 10009

Sad to have missed the chance to contribute your experiences and words of wisdom? Fear not! We are turning this exciting zine series into a book!

Final Call for submissions: March 15, 2011.

See our blogspot for more details: dontleaveyourfriendsbehind.blogspot.com

Everett Anderson's Goodbye as Read by Assata

Everett Anderson's Goodbye: As Read by Assata from Alexis Gumbs on Vimeo.

Part of the Lucille Clifton ShapeShifter Survival School

This Bridge Called My Baby: Legacies of Radical Mothering

http://thisbridgecalledmybaby.wordpress.com/



"We can learn to mother ourselves." Audre Lorde, 1983

All mothers have the potential to be revolutionary. Some mothers stand on the shoreline, are born and reborn here, inside the flux of time and space, overcoming the traumatic repetition of oppression. Our very existence is disobedience to the powers that be.
At times, in moments, we as mothers choose to stand in a zone of claimed risk and fierce transformation, the frontline. In infinite ways, both practiced and yet to be imagined, we put our bodies between the violent repetition of the norm and the future we already deserve, exactly because our children deserve it too. We make this choice for many reasons and in different contexts, but at the core we have this in common: we refuse to obey. We refuse to give into fear. We insist on joy no matter what and by every means necessary and possible.
In this anthology we are exploring how we are informed by and participating with those mothers, especially radical women of color, who have sought for decades, if not centuries, to create relationships to each other, transformative relationships to feminism and a transnational anti-imperialist literary, cultural and everyday practice.

"We don't want a space where kids feel that only adults can imagine ways to strengthen our communities and protect ourselves against the Architects of Despair," Sora said, "and we don't want adults to feel that either. We want to create a space where all of our imaginations help each other grow; but we realize that kids might get bored from sitting still the way that adults tend to do, so we set up the play room with toys and games." Regeneracion Childcare Collective 2007

Sometimes for radical mamas, our mothering in radical community makes visible the huge gulfs between communities, between parents and non-parents, in class and other privileges AND most importantly the wide gulf between what we say in activist communities and what we actually do. Radical mothering is the imperative to build bridges that allow us to relate across these very real barriers. For and by radical mother of color, but also inclusive of other working class, marginalized, low income, no income radical mothers.


"Parenting and being a role model to kids in your community is important because they will be the activists of tomorrow. And they will be our gardeners and mothers and bakers. They will question our generation, they'll write their own history, create new forms of art and media." -Noemi Martinez 2009

We find the idea of the "bridge" useful because we believe that the radical practice of mothering is at once a practical and visionary relationship to the future IN the PRESENT, a bridge within time that can inspire us to relate to each other intentionally across generation and space. We also acknowledge the not-so-radical default bridge function of marginalized mother in society. How our children in particular get walked all over in terms of public policy that criminalizes our mothering and movement spaces that claim to be creating a transformed future without being fully accountable to parents or kids.

"I came into the Third World Women’s Caucus when it was well under way. The women there were discussing the caucus resolution to be presented to the general conference. There were Asian women, Latin women, Native Women and Afro-American women. The discussion when I came in was around the controversial issue of motherhood and how the wording of the resolution could best reflect the feelings of those present. It was especially heartening to hear other women affirm that not only should lesbian mothers be supported but that all third world women lesbians share in the responsibility for the care and nurturing of the children of individual lesbians of color...Another woman reminded us of the commitment we must take to each other when she said ‘All children (of lesbians) are ours." -Doc in Off Our Backs 1979

We see this book as a continuation of the accountability invoking movement midwifing work of the 1981 anthology This Bridge Called My Back in that it:
a. is the work of writers who see their writing as part of a mothering practice, as not career, but calling and who believe that their writing, and their every creative practice has a strategic role in transforming the possible world.
b. contextualizes contemporary radical mama practices in relationship to socialist and lesbian mothering practices experimented with and practiced in the 1970’s by writers including Audre Lorde, June Jordan, Adrienne Rich, Third World Lesbians conference, Salsa Soul Sisters, Sisterhood of Black Single Mothers
c. seeks to speak to those who participated in that earlier practice and who have been informed by it as a primary audience, and to connect those who have not have access to that work to it

We invite submissions including but not limited to the following possibilities:

*Manifestas, group poems, letters, mission statements from your crew of radical mamas or an amazing group from history
*Letters, poems, transcribed phone calls between radical mamas supporting each other
*Accounts of your experience as a radical mama
*Reflections on enacting radical mamacity at different ages
*Motivations for/obstacles in your practice of radical mothering
*Conversations with your kids
*Rants and rages via the eloquence of a mother-wronged
*Your experience of radical grandmothering
*Self-interviews, interviews with other mamis
*Birthing experiences
*Ending child sexual abuse
*Mothering as survivors (survival and mothering)
*Mothering with and without models
*Mothering and domination
*Mama to-do lists
*Mama/kid collaborations...
*Radical fathering
*Overcoming shame and silence in the practice of radical mothering

*Ambivilence, paradox, emotions, vulnerability

*Experiences of state violence/CPS

*Balancing daily survival

*Loss of children, not living with children, custody arrangements and issues
*Sharing your stories from where you live

*Everything we haven't thought of yet! Take a deep breath and WRITE!!!!

Please send submissions via email to
alexispauline@gmail.com
maiamedicine@gmail.com
and china410@hotmail.com
or via snail mail to
P.O. Box 4803 Baltimore Maryland 21211

by April 1, 2011.

A Dream of Foxes: Lucille Clifton Rebirth Broadcast 4

A Dream of Foxes: Lucille Clifton Rebirth Broadcast 4 from Alexis Gumbs on Vimeo.

And don’t forget to sign up for the Lucille Clifton ShapeShifter Poetry Intensive: http://blackfeministmind.wordpress.com/survival-school/

Amazons: Lucille Clifton Rebirth Broadcast #3

Lucille Clifton Rebirth Broadcast 3: Amazons from Alexis Gumbs on Vimeo.

This broadcast is part of the Lucille Clifton ShapeShifter Survival School. For more info see blackfeministmind.wordpress.com/survival-school.

To sign up for the Lucille Clifton ShapeShifter Survival Poetry Intensive on August 21, 2010 in Durham, NC click here: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/3LH6G9J