S.O.N.G.

This visions statement comes from the SONG affiliate group in Durham, NC. It has been compiled by Alexis Pauline Gumbs. I am not sure how to introduce it, maybe it speaks for itself.

This is the bad gay, queer dangerous capital of the universe. Where our joyful resistance teaches us to stand here, embrace each other and be the change the bravery of our ancestors demands

This is a chosen family, supportive and open, loving and wild. We are youth, we are elders, we are connected across generations through questioning and faith.

We are queer and gender queer, which means we are always exploring and holding new ground. Love is our primary resource with which we sustain our communities and transform our world. We are rebellious and intentional with our love, pushing daily into new meanings of love until it becomes overwhelmingly obvious that LOVE MEANS EVERYTHING.

This is a place of lustful awareness, where erotic difference and sex positivity teach us what it means to be free and fabulous.

This is where we share our skills and resources, enjoy each other, laugh, make music out of madness and grow our yeses into work and purpose.

This is a space of accountability and shared values. We aspire for clarity, honesty and open-ness and we strive to be clear about our boundaries.

This is a place free of stigma around physical/mental illness or disability, where we love our bodies and listen to the brilliance that comes into the world shaped by our uniqueness.

This is a member-led movement where we walk our talk, speak up even when it’s hard, encourage each other’s growing voices, hold each other through the contours of life, take risks and stay together.

This is a space that centers the needs and the insight of those most affected by the deadly injustices that our vision has outgrown.

This is a space rooted in spirit and land, where our histories are lovingly present as we envision and reach new ground. This is a space built by our living and sustained by our desire to be embodied together.

This is a place where we build culture by reading together, eating together, remembering and sharing our sacred stories.

We meet here regularly to remember who we said we were and to fall in love all over again.

From here, we show the world what love looks like when you live it, eat it, breathe it, bathe in it, sleep in it and wake up singing in it too. From here, we are building an interconnected movement that will shift the world into loving alignment in our lifetimes.

Welcome home.

Here it is in Spanish as well: SONG Durham Vision StatementSP

By SONG members Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Manju Rajendran & Isabell Moore

Published on: January 01, 2008 (first appeared in Left Turn Magazine)

Ask most progressive activists and organizers to characterize this moment and you will hear about gloom (How can this man actually be president?) and doom (This war has no end. Our use of environmental resources is killing the planet). But writer, biologist, and UBUNTU activist Kriti Sharma, emphasizes this suggestion, “Even on the eve of the end of the earth, plant a tree.” (Musnad Ahmad, Hadith). Accordingly, while there is doom and gloom (or even because of these two circumstances) there must also be bloom: growth, life, celebration, and beauty sustained by deep faith and critical hope.

This is not an obvious point. Many of us working on the Left are informed by Marxist, Anarchist, and other revolutionary traditions that focus on the role religious institutions have played in distracting oppressed people from their material conditions and maintaining capitalism, patriarchy, hierarchy, and dominance. We draw cynical conclusions about the potential of spirituality or religion—or ourselves—to build a just world, and we see the role that many faiths and institutions have played in reinforcing or justifying state power.

“The religious right appropriated the name and the institution of the spirit-based movement for justice, they captured it and wrestled it to the ground in order to put a different spirit out there. They wedged, split, and promoted domination by a small minority. They are going exactly the opposite way under the rubric of religion in a way that violates the deepest meanings of spirit and faith. We can’t allow it to be done. We have to try to create an alternative because it’s so deceptively false, and because it’s the right thing to do,” says the Reverend Nelson Johnson.

This section asserts that faith does not have to be either “false consciousness” deluding us into complacency or fear-based conservatism. Faith, used intentionally, can be one essential resource that allows us to sustain our action to create a world that is radically different than the one we are now surviving. The vectors of faith that we have named in the title of this section “religion” and “spirituality” have complicated relationships to each other and to our work. They are not interchangeable, they are not opposites and they are not necessarily companion terms, nor can either stand alone. While we have not arrived at strict definitions of “religion” and “spirituality,” we use both terms to gesture towards the places that we find our sustenance and faith.

Some of us access our spirits through a particular religious tradition. Some of us engage in spiritual practice that has not been institutionalized or validated as “religion” in the US landscape, but nonetheless draws on traditions that have evolved over centuries. Some of us engage critically with established religions, seeking to transform institutional norms and access faith at the same time. Some of us are involved in particularly libratory strains of dominant religions. Some of us work with our ancestors to develop spiritual practices on our own terms. Some of us bravely inhabit and represent religious traditions that have been demonized and slandered by the Religious Right. Some of us read what Audre Lorde and Che Guevara say about love as scripture to guide our spirits through struggle.

The three of us, all organizers living and working in the South for most of our lives, and currently all living in North Carolina, find our faith and our growth planted in this southern soil. We offer this piece, based on conversations with faith-full folks in our lives, as witness to spirituality and religion as resources for (and challenges to) movement building in the South, especially North Carolina, with the hope that it resonates for organizers in other regions of the United States.

National murmurs

There are increasing murmurs nationally toward welcoming spirituality and religion into Left spaces, and a growing faith-based radical movement. In the words of Stone Circles co-directors Claudia Horwitz and Jesse Maceo Vega-Frey, “We are moving toward a doing that grows more deliberately out of being; an understanding that freedom from external systems of oppression is dynamically related to liberation from our internal mechanisms of suffering.” Examples abound. At the SisterSong “Let’s Talk About Sex” May 2007 national conference in Chicago, women and trans people participated in large opening and closing spiritual ceremonies involving invocation of God(desse)s and ancestral spirits. At the first US Social Forum in June 2007, a Healing and Spiritual Practice Tent was one of the hubs of activity, hosting well-attended workshops, ceremonies, and therapeutic sessions. Kaliya Hamlin of Integrative Activism in Berkeley maintains a directory of over 300 programs and organizations connecting spiritual and religious practice with movement work.

Vimala Rajendran, a devout Christian from a liberation theology perspective, and one of the co-founders of community access station The People’s Channel in Chapel Hill, says she feels more religious and spiritual people are leaning to the left lately, and more progressive people are turning to spirituality. “People are realizing that spirituality goes hand in hand with works on earth. Personal stories are showing them that we don’t have to be on our own. There is a force out there greater than ourselves, which is also inside of those who seek.”

Transformative interventions

Many of the spiritually based activists, organizers, and community builders we spoke to saw spirituality as a key intervention into the often toxic culture that hurts us as individuals and invades our movement customs. They told us that their practices of faith had potential to be both personally healing and transformative of movement culture.

“The reason we are learning how to heal, by practicing on ourselves is because our movement needs healing,” says Nia Wilson, executive director of SpiritHouse. She describes the basic spirituality sustaining her work and healing as a belief in “first breath”. In Alex’s Story, an audio record of her journey of healing from sexual assault, she says, “Our first breath is divine. It is who we really are. Healing means honoring that first breath. We can always get in touch with our purpose for living.”

Purpose and spirit are central to the work of SpiritHouse, which uses art, self-expression and resource distribution to affirm the bodies, minds, and spirits of Durham’s black communities. In all their innovative programs, they use spiritual and healing practices to create a space where “our whole selves are safe and held.” Wilson and other members of the organization see this spiritual work as more and more necessary in a progressive movement characterized by burnout, exhaustion and pain.

For Afiya Carter, former director of the Weaver Street Community center in a public housing community, and current special events coordinator for W.D. Hill Community Center, both in Durham, spirituality provides a needed critique to the norms of movement culture. She remembers getting involved with local activism as a young mother and realizing “there was no place for kids to go.” Meetings that swallowed up what she calls her “hard earned time” and offered neither food, nor childcare, nor any other form of nurturing seemed to guarantee that working-class people would be excluded.

Carter, a practicing Muslim since her early childhood, was taught that the Prophet Mohammed married enslaved, disabled, and otherwise shunned women to prove that all people were worthy of respect and love. She was taught that according to Islamic law, women were never to be considered the property of men and that the education and freedom of women was the measure of a strong community. Her grandparents’ belief in religious diversity gave her a “broadened sense of who was in the world and who was valid,” and taught her that difference is a requirement for organizing. Afiya’s spirituality leads her to create community events that include centering the needs of mothers and children and embrace the complexity of communities in the making.

Spiritual practice can also transform our erotic selves and bring erotic spiritual energy into our movements. Calling her speech at the 2007 SisterSong Reproductive Justice Conference “testimony to those who have lost their bodies and lives in our communities through being commodified, criminalized, sexualized, colonized, and stigmatized,” Cara Page, creator of Deeper Waters and national director of the Committee for Population, Women and the Environment, invoked countless unknown ancestors as well as one specific ancestor, Audre Lorde. “When we are able to be sexual voluntarily and consensually we are able to have the freedom of choosing to receive touch and to give it, to receive energy and life and to give it, to possibly even receive love and transform it.” So creating community requires understanding our own relationships to life, energy, and love in the face of social and physical death.

Caitlin Breedlove, co-director of Southerners On New Ground (SONG) notes that since she and co-director Paulina Hernandez have turned the organization over to their deep faith in the queer working-class people of color communities that they are building, “things just started to go right with SONG.” Breedlove notes that working in a community committed to her whole spirit makes her less susceptible to burnout because she understands that she is valued through a long-term love relationship, not the need for immediate results. While many organizations focus on being against, “We can organize around longing,” Breedlove testifies, “We can organize around love.” Breedlove and co-director Paulina Hernandez envision their upcoming organizing schools as “revivals,” not as extended workshops or places for skill-accumulation, but rather as ways to “ignite the kindred,” to wake up our souls.

History and tradition

While spiritual and religious based movements may look “new” to some, many of the organizers who blessed us with stories draw on spiritual teachings that they recognize as historically rooted strategies for the survival of oppressed people. When asked whether he sees a major “increase” in spiritual and religious organizing in the South, Russell Herman—who coaches organizations and organizers to strengthen movement-building across North Carolina—says, “I’m not prepared to say there’s a big increase, if you take a 50-100 year span. I do see more religious language being used in contexts where I didn’t see it, oh, 20 years ago maybe—but I wouldn’t call that faith-based movement work. One factor is an unconscious adoption of the religious tone of the current mainstream society. And then sometimes there’s a deliberate attempt to use the mainstream language to communicate with people who are most used to that language. For some organizers, that is their language.”

Many organizers also told us that they purposefully both draw on and update traditional practices to strengthen their organizing. Omisade Burney of Anansi Productions, a consulting organization based in Durham, explains, “I believe in the interconnectedness of spirituality and activism and the mighty and righteous work of indigenous leaders tethered to ancestral imperatives in local communities and small organizations.” Burney tells us this intersection of spiritual grounding and movement has a long history in communities of color, from Yoruba, an African-based spiritual practice based on the belief that ancestors communicate and look after those of us living in the present, to the theology of elders from the civil rights era.

Black christian churches are perhaps the best known—though not the only—originators of spirit-based movements in the Southeastern United States. Many organizations drawing on African-American and working-class traditions of struggle in the South are currently involved with challenging the mainstream appropriation of religious spaces as havens for conservative, anti-worker, homophobic, and anti-feminist values through a faith in the present potential of Southern communities.

In Greensboro, the Beloved Community Center (BCC), draws on Martin Luther King Jr.’s concept of beloved community and “works towards social and economic relations that affirm and realize the equality, dignity, worth, and potential of every person.” Reverend Nelson Johnson, one of the founders of the group, started his activism as a student liberal integrationist, then was a Black power advocate, next a pan-Africanist, then a labor organizer and student of Marxism, and is now a is a pastor of Faith Community Church. “We are all spiritual and everything is spiritual. Spirit is inherent in being. Through all my different periods as an organizer, I was driven by a sense of spirit.”

Johnson and the BCC work closely with Word and World, a Greensboro-based national organization that draws the theological work of Black civil rights leaders into the present. Word and World, a popular education school committed to reinventing theological practice for social justice, practices biography as theology, literally reading the lives of activist leaders as the work of God, and therefore as scripture to build faith for movement in the present. As they plan their next school to focus on the life of Audre Lorde, Word and World refuses to translate theological work into nostalgia for the past, or a conservative view of the present. They exemplify a tradition-based but future-oriented theological practice of community embrace that resonates with the work of the Washington, DC-based Al-Fatiha Foundation (see organizational profiles).

At their most recent school in July of 2007, Word and World partnered with the Beloved Community Center and the Southern Faith Labor and Community Alliance (SFLCA) in a focus on economic justice and issues effecting North Carolina workers. Founded in 2005 in Greensboro, the SFLCA framing document, authored by the Reverends Nelson Johnson and J. Herbert Nelson, states, “We believe that Dr. King’s theological understanding that ‘unearned suffering is redemptive’ speaks to the rich treasure of suffering born out of slavery and Jim-Crowism. This treasure can flow into a transformative movement with work and labor at its center.”

They make it clear from the beginning, “From the perspective of faith, the South has reflected the dual trend of progressive, relevant theology on the one hand and backward, negative theology on the other hand. Since the Reconstruction period, the South has exerted a disproportionate negative impact on national priorities, including the refusal to uphold the dignity of work and value of those who carry it out on a day to day basis.”

The religious right and even some liberal Christians have traditionally interpreted all faith journeys as striving towards the afterlife, trying to earn a place in an always future heaven. But Beloved Community Center, SFLCA, and Word and World all are organizations that challenge this notion. Johnson asks, “How can we continue on the vocation of becoming more human? It’s different than just trying to get to heaven. Most people think you have to suffer on this earth, then leave to get to heaven, but Jesus is trying to help you make heaven here.” Faith-based movements are thoughtfully drawing on deep tradition while bravely shaping that tradition in new ways to aid in liberation as they forge a path forward.

Challenges forward

Stories of transformative faith and rooted spiritual traditions were not all we heard. We also received words of caution by many connected to this burgeoning movement. Growth is a complex process, embattled and facilitated by environmental factors at every turn. Johnson explains, “A theologian once said the best place for God to hide is in a church. I sometimes think the best place for God to hide is in religion. Religion is both a place to trap the spirit, and a potential place to release it. We must recognize that it has potential to trap the spirit if we want to be able to use religion to release spirit.”

Rishi Awatramani, recent transplant to North Carolina and participant in the Buddhist Sanctuary program for activists and organizers (see organizational profiles) also points out that spiritual practice is not above commodification, noting that “The commodification of Eastern religion as Western spirituality has given rise to a Spiritual Wellness Industry, and movement activists and organizers in the US consume spiritual widgets, much like the rest of society. The conversation of spirit and self-care is not in itself wholly organic to the movement, and reflects movement-building deficiencies as much as it reflects the echo of capitalism reverberating throughout civil society.” Awatramani practices a focused spiritual love within his community while maintaining a larger systemic analysis that applies to the dynamics of movement building.

When asked why people he knows organize in religious spaces, Russell Herman answers, “The main strands of that thinking seems to be that religion—and here [in North Carolina], mostly Christianity—is a main influence on the thinking of the public, therefore it’s useful to have your ideas be available in that venue, and if possible, promoted in that venue.” Herman warns about the danger of elevating religion and spirituality to the point that they seem to be the only contexts for human connection. This could not only leave people with out explicit spiritual practice out of the conversation but also limit our awareness of tools we can use to transform movements.

Herman also notes, however, that churches are also strategic resources for movement building. “People are there. You go where the people are. And some people share the belief—since they are there anyway, they organize there. Some people’s analysis tells them that it’s a key element of society that needs to be organized…In certain sectors of society churches are one of the few economically autonomous institutions that are somewhat democratic.”

Awatramani challenges, “Where do we remember that it is people’s (real and perceived) relationship to ownership that more often than not determines their compulsion to rise up, how much of their heart they give of themselves? The time has come, I believe, to understand the true class character of the non-profit sector and of the spiritual activism networks in order to best understand why old limitations persist and new trends have emerged within our movement-to-be.” While spirituality, religion and faith may provide strength to movements, we must not see them as a catch-all, fix-all that will suddenly make everything work.

While Awatramani’s spiritual practice has strengthened his movement work and relationships, he warns us not to allow faith in spiritual practice to make every challenge of struggle a measure of our failure to approach divinity, “Let’s not forget…that our movement suffers not just because we’re not spiritual enough in our work, but also because we toil in the belly of the beast, with few successes, and no movement…yet.”

It is these challenges that inspire us to make the work of spiritual and religious organizations and organizers visible in this special section, to spark a conversation within the Left about how we can critically love religious and spiritual traditions, plant deeper faith, and produce creative energy in our movement. And bloom…

About the Authors

Alexis Pauline Gumbs is a member of SONG, UBUNTU, and SpiritHouse and is the founder of Broken-Beautiful Press Feel free to contact Alexis at alexispauline(at)gmail.com.

Manju Rajendran is a 27-year old Desi based in Durham, North Carolina. Her mama is Christian, her papa is Hindu, and she’s just saucy. She is a proud member of UBUNTU, SONG, Future5000.com and the Not Your Soldier advisory board. Holla: manju.rajendran(at)gmail.com.

Isabell Moore is a 27-year old white chick based in Greensboro, where she is proud to be involved with Cakalak Drum Corps, Southerners On New Ground, the Fund for Democratic Communities and the Leadership and Empowerment Institute. She is currently an MA student in Women and Gender Studies at UNC-Greensboro. Contact her at zed(at)riseup.net.

Check out these resources: http://www.integrativeactivism.net/spiritual_activism.html

The Creation Story

By Joy Harjo

I’m not afraid of love
or its consequences of light.

It’s not easy to say this
or anything when my entrails
dangle between paradise
and fear.

I am ashamed
I never had the words
to carry a friend from her death
to the stars
correctly.

Or the words to keep my people safe from drought
or gunshot.

The stars who were created by words are
circling over this house
formed of calcium, of blood—

this house
in danger of being torn apart
by stones of fear.

If these words can do anything
I say bless this house
with stars

Transfix us with love.

Written By: Alexis Pauline Gumbs

First published on September 8, 2007 in Trea’zure Magazine

Girl, you want this. You know it. You would stand in line for it. Waste your time for it. Work all year to pay for it. You would dress up for it. Strip down for it. Travel out of town for it. You would scheme, dream, sell your soul for a pass at this. You wake up wanting this, and you pass out dreaming it too.

And no. I’m not talking about sex, and I’m definitely not talking about money. I am talking about what we really want. The need that races your heart to the beat of the next black gay pride celebration. Queer black women like me and you stay up all night craving a community where we can be ourselves and express our love freely. We know that we deserve to feel at home everywhere we go. We deserve to be reflected lovingly in the eyes of strangers. We deserve to feel well-fed and safe in the homes we create.

But we are deprived. Everyday we experience the unwanted advances of disrespectful men and boys as we walk down the street. We work at jobs where we can’t be open about our sexual desire for women. We consume TV shows and music that ridicule or ignore our lives. We get harassed when we hold each other’s hands. And worst of all we are subject to racist, sexist and homophobic violence at all times. And the law does not protect us.

So we take what we can get. Because we are desperate for the sight of each other. We thirst to remember we exist. We pay full price for watered-down drinks at the one club in town that has a gay night and plays hip-hop. We drive for hours and shell out even more money for overpriced nightlife events at Black Pride celebrations around the country. We bear a party scene that is reminiscent of a second-rate hip-hop music video with neither a hook, nor a storyline. We even accept disrespect and stay in abusive and unhealthy relationships because love seems so hard to come by.

And we are not wrong for this. It is no surprise that after 10 months of keeping our desire for women under wraps we go buckwild at “hot-body” contests and pad our pockets with one dollar bills for go-go dancers. And this is definitely not meant to disrespect those of us who dance to support ourselves and our families.

But we deserve MORE than two nights of extreme sexual expression to sustain us for the next year of silence, fear and repression. And the fact that we survive invisibility and violence from the larger society along with violence and disrespect in our OWN spaces and keep coming back for more is proof of how much we want each other.

In these, the worst of circumstances our need for each other does not die. The fact that we have enough energy to keep funding the less-than-perfect spaces that are available to us proves that we ALSO have enough energy to create something else. An empowering community is not something we can buy, barter for or pay admission to get into. It is not waiting for us at the next chocolate city “Girl Ball”. Community is something we have to make ourselves.

This magazine is an example of black queer women coming together to create a space of empowerment and mentorship for each other, and this is just one example in a rich tradition. For example, the Combahee River Collective, a group of black lesbians in Boston in the 1970’s held retreats and did day to day organizing to fight violence against women, win more jobs for black people in black communities and eventually created Kitchen Table Press a publishing company especially for women of color centered on the writings of lesbians. Today, magazines like this and publishing companies like RedBone Press continue that legacy along with the other community organizations and informal support networks that keep us alive. Community is something that WE create ourselves.

And I believe that we can, because those of us who are brazen enough to endure spike heels and shiver half-naked for the attention of other women, those of us who are bold enough to bend gender and shine studly despite what the men on the street might say or do in response, those of us who insist on being ourselves no matter what anyone says are warriors. Those of us who are BRAVE enough to do anything for the possibility of love are also STRONG enough to go for the real thing.

Alexis Pauline Gumbs is queer black trouble-maker, a freedom seeking writer, a PhD candidate in English, Africana Studies and Women’s Studies at Duke University the founder of BrokenBeautiful Press & a SONG member. She lusts for community, so email her at alexispauline@gmail.com.

“We need to find the compass to map our own territories and borders of our sex, sexuality, gender, and our erotic”.

Poetic Speech given at SisterSong Conference Spring 2007 ~ By Cara Page

SONG member Cara Page is also the National Director of the Committee on Women Population and the Environment; she is a queer of color artist, organizer, and healing arts practitioner. A recipient of the Rockefeller Foundation Next Generation Leadership Fellowship (2000 – 2001) and awarded for her leadership and contributions as an artist and activist for human rights by the National Center for Human Rights & Education. She is a founder of Deeper Waters, a company providing reflective and creative practice as tools for organizing and individual and collective transformation. (cara@cwpe.org or deeperwaters@gmail.com)

This is a collage done by Alexis Pauline Gumbs, SONG family member, while listening to SONG folk talk about the work….

The poem below was also written by Alexis and presented to a group of 100 visionary LGBTQ folk who are building a queer movement from the bottom to the left, at a meeting convened by SONG and Queers For Economic Justice

poem about how much i want you………..

DEDICATED to the attendees of the Building A Queer Left Pre-Forum Meeting and the girl on the Atlanta-Hartsfield Jackson Airport Photo Mural.

i can’t lie to you
atlanta done laid me down
heat painted pavement to stay

taught me
that to be alien
was to be here
so to be queer
must be hip hop
(beat beaten but beaming still)

atlanta taught me
music could war
and drop-kicked hope
landed and landed
in Bankhead
it would bounce

atlanta remains
a city brazen enough
to kill me and keep moving
but I would STILL tattoo OutKast lyrics on my grave

what I am trying to tell you is
love is a sin
that at best trains me up
in the everyday art of not being a slave

but this is how much i want you

i would cringe into asphalt
fuck the compromise of sidewalks
if it meant you could stand in the middle and sing

i would shelter
the highest pedestrian deathrate
if it made the craziest among us
more likely immortal

would drawl down secrets
melt your sneakers
and name every pathway after what I can’t afford

if it meant you would
never forget me

i would be the place
spread open
divided
for the queer and fly to multiply

because this is how much i want you
and you’re here

welcome home.

(Above: Mandy Carter, SONG founder, with Guy and Candie Carawan, Civil Rights Movement Elders, at SONG house party 2007)

We Know The Value of Honoring Our Elders. They are part of not only our past, but also our present and our future. Here are some great words from Mandy:

“The underlying principle of SONG has never been about promoting SONG as much as it is the values of the work. Because we decided this is more important, it takes out a lot of the stuff that gets in the way. SONG has always been about how do we pass along stuff, engage in conversations so it’s not always about asking folks to come to our table–the SONG table– instead it’s about going to other people’s tables, going to where people are. We go and listen or we go to a third space – we did a complete inventory of the South–a listening– this mapping of who we know is out there against the backdrop of race/class/age and then we did visiting of those folks or efforts and it did create a relationship so that we could know what people are doing. Now we’re going into our 13th or 14th year and it still works – visiting other tables always works.”
-Mandy Carter, 2007

Below is a poem that SONG member Alexis wrote in preparation for the Day of Truthtelling March: So that we are in the vision of what can and will be, and not only the reality of how we have been hurt and what we long for…

dedicated to the black women at Duke and North Carolina Central Universities, and you…

1. you wake up each day
as new as anyone
there is no reason to assume
you would be supernaturally strong.
there is no reason to test your strength
through daily disrespect and neglect.
you don’t need to be strong.
everyone supports you.

2. if you say ouch
we believe that you are hurt.
we wait to hear how we can help
to mend your pain.

3. you have chosen to be at a school,
at a workplace, in a community
that knows that you are priceless
that would never sacrifice your spirit
that knows it needs your brilliance to be whole

4. your very skin
is sacred
and everything beyond it
is a miracle that we revere

5. we mourn any violence that
has ever been enacted against you.
we will do what it takes
to make sure that it doesn’t happen again.
to anyone.

6. when you speak
we listen.
we are so glad that you
are here, of all places.

7. other women
even strangers
reach out to you
when you seem afraid
and they stay
until peace comes

8. the sun
reminds everyone
how much they love you.

9. people are interested
in what you are wearing
simply
because it tells them
what paintings to make.

10. everyone has always told you
you can stay a child
until you are ready to move on

11. if you run across the street
naked at midnight
no one will think
you are asking
for anything.

12. you do so many things
because it feels good to move.
you have nothing to prove
to anyone.

13. white people cannot harm you.
they do not want to.
they do not do it by accident.

14. your smile makes people
glad to be alive

15. your body is not
a symbol of anything

16. everyone respects your work
and makes sure you are safe
while doing it

17. at any moment
you might relive
the joy of being embraced

18. no one will lie to you,
scream at you
or demand anything.

19. when you change your mind,
people will remember to change theirs.

20. your children are safe
no one will use them against you.

21. the university is a place where you
are reflected and embraced.
anyone who forgets how miraculous you are
need only open their eyes.

22. the universe conspires
to lift you
up.

23. on the news everynight
people who look like you and
the people you love
are applauded
for their contribution to society.

24. the place where knowledge is
has no walls.

25. you are rewarded for the work you do
to keep it all together.

26. every song i’ve
ever heard on the radio
is in praise
of you.

27. the way you speak
is exactly right
for wherever you happen
to be.

28. there is no continent anywhere
where life counts as nothing.

29. there is no innocence that needs your guilt
to prove it.

30. there is no house
in your neighborhood
where you still hear screams
every time you go
past.

31. no news camera waits
to amplify your pain.

32. nobody wonders
whether you will make it.
everybody believes in you

33. when you have a child
no one finds it tragic.
no map records it as an instance of blight.

34. no one hopes you will give up
on your neighborhood
so they can buy it up cheap.

35. everyone asks you your name.
no one calls you out of it.

36. someone is thinking highly of you
right now.

37. being around you
makes people want to be
their kindest, most generous selves.

38. there is no law anywhere
that depends on your silence.

39. nobody bases their privilege
on their ability to desecrate you.

40. everyone will believe anything you say
because they have been telling you the truth
all along.

41. school is a place, like every other place.
no one here is out to get you.

42. worldwide, girls who look like you
are known for having great ideas.

43. 3 in 3 women will fall in love with themselves
during their lifetime.

44. every minute in North Carolina
a woman embraces
another woman.

45. you know 8 people
who will help you move
to a new place
if you need to.

46. when you speak loudly
everyone is happy
because they wondered
what you were thinking about.

47. people give you gifts
and truly expect nothing
in return.

48. no one thinks you are
over-reacting.

49. everyone believes
that you should have all
the resources that you need,
because by being yourself
you make the world so much
brighter.

50. any creases on your face
are from laughter.

51. no one, anywhere, is locked in a cage.

52. you are completely used to knowing what you want.
following your dream is as easy as walking.

53. you are more than enough.

54. everyone is waiting
to see what great thing
you’ll do next.

55. every institution wants to know
what you think, so they can find out
what they should really be doing,
or shut down.

56. strangers send you love letters
thanking you
for speaking your mind.

57. you wake up
as new
as anyone.

“Gaining access to Material privilege alone will never satisfy needs of the Spirit. These hungers persist and haunt us. We seek to satisfy those cravings by endless consumption, appetites that easily turn into addictions that can never be satisfied. Needs of the Spirit can only be satisfied when we care for the Soul. Our ancestors knew this. Only a politics of conversion where we return to love can save us.”

~bell hooks

“Weep loudly for what you cannot save,
and do it loudly for all your descendants to hear…
Let it be known
that you resist the dissolution of families…
of cells, of atoms, of parts from their whole…”

Below… is a beautiful zine of poetry by SONG member Kriti Sharma. Get ready immigrant folks–this stuff has been known to make us cry with recognition and tenderness along with other comrades….