[ MUSIC... ]
Hello loved ones!
Welcome to week 8 of Audre Lorde Resurrection Sundays.
I'm Sister Doctor Lex.
I'm especially excited today because I am getting ready to go to Cuba very soon,
and I am thinking so much about Audre Lorde, who went to Cuba in January also, in 1985,
along with a lot of other brilliant Black women writers
like Alexis DeVeaux and Jayne Cortez, and Mari Evans, and so many more.
So I am excited about this video because I'm getting my energy up for that trip,
I'm really excited to participate in a cultural exchange,
and I'm able to go with a delegation of amazing people of colour who I love,
who I'm doing work with here in the united states,
and I'm very excited about how what we learn in Cuba will influence the work we do together.
So this week I'm sharing with you the poem "Diapora".
That we know of, and, um, biographer Alexis DeVeaux also said
that we don't know of a place where Audre Lorde wrote publicly about her experience in Cuba,
but this poem "Diapora" is about her transnational work more generally,
and how she thought about the experiences of people all over the world,
including folks in Lebanon, including people in South Africa...
and I think that as I think about what it will mean to engage with other Black folks in Cuba,
I want to have these words in mind. So this is "Diaspora".
Afraid is a country with no exit visas
a wire of ants walking the horizon
embroiders our passports at birth
Johannesburg Alabama
a dark girl flees the cattle prods
skin hanging from her shredded nails
escapes into my nightmare
half an hour before the Shatila dawn
wakes in the well of a borrowed Volkswagen
or a rickety midnight sleeper out of White River Junction
Washington bound again
gulps carbon monoxide in a false bottomed truck
fording the Braceras Grande
or an up-country river
grenades held in a dry calabash
leaving
So for me that poem has to do with
what is at stake for people of colour to be in solidarity with each other,
and all of that means in terms of the conflicts that exist all around the world,
and especially the economic violence that is part of systems of domination and globalization,
that people of colour face differently in different places.
And I'm excited! Sometime soon, a chapter that I wrote about Audre Lorde's theories of solidarity,
especially in relationship to majority Black spaces and nations in the world,
um, will be coming out in a book that's about Audre Lorde's transnational impact.
So of course if you are following the School of Our Lorde blog
you will know when you will have access to that.
And! I also wanted to make a somewhat self-serving assignment to you,
in addition to thinking about your impact on people of colour
in other countries than the country that you may be situated in right now,
I would love it if you could make a donation to Witness For Peace.
I'm so grateful to that organization for sponsoring this people of colour specific delegation to Cuba,
and I have information on the School of Our Lorde site
and also on the Doctor Alexis Pauline Gumbs site
about how you can make a donation to that project.
I strongly hope that you will,
to support not just our trip
but also the practice, the continued practice
of people of colour delegations to be able to exchange in a particular specific and nuanced way
around the world.
Thank you so much for listening.
And...
happy Resurrection Sunday.