Catch Up & Movements

This month has been intense... especially for me up in the wintery wetlands of the North... bitter cold days, snow storm after snowpocolyse and then some more... so I've been in hibernation mostly - working, creating, and in deep reflection about all kinds of movements and planning for what's next in my journey. I'm praying for springtime and sunshine and truthfully ready for summer heat! So much going on and too much to share... so just a recap - writing, teaching, and deep in the thick of figuring out my life... I feel like many of us that it's time for change... we are in times of crisis and major shifts in planetary consciousness. Our time is now... and so with all of that, this post is just about sharing a couple few things I've been working on: like this project I started with a good friend of mine (Tei Okamoto) last year - called Love and Affection. And this year, we have officially launched our website and creative partnership called Current Tides. Our first project is in progress!

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The Love and Affection Project is an oral history project that will be the first archive of its kind to explore and record the lives of those who were affected by the epidemic as a child and/or young adult and lost either one or both parents/guardians to AIDS related complications. We seek to hear, record, and remember the stories and events that shaped a young person, now grown, whose parent/guardian/caretaker died of HIV/AIDS. While the project is based in the United States, we aim to include many of the voices of the epidemic internationally. We also acknowledge communities that are most affected by HIV/AIDS and would like to privilege voices and communities that are marginalized and underrepresented.

Creative partners Angelique V. Nixon and Tei Okamoto work actively in various communities and are dedicated to radical movements for social change. They are invested in contributing to the oral history archive of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. They have engaged in preliminary research through talking with people living with HIV who have adult children. Furthermore, both of them have been affected by HIV/AIDS - losing loved ones, caring for loved ones, and one of them (Angelique) lost a parent to AIDS in 1996. 

We have both experienced the myriad ways that stories about HIV/AIDS and death remain silenced - particularly in marginalized communities (i.e. poor and working class communities, immigrant communities, queer communities, and communities of color - and across the intersections of these). Together, we come from and represent these communities - poor, working class, migrant, queer, and of color - and though we exist at different intersections, we connect through shared experiences. Hence, our investment in this project is multifaceted - personal, political, spiritual, and emotional.

Find us on our Facebook Page and/or email me at angeliquevnixon @ gmail.com for more info.

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And another thing I've been working on... excited to share on my blog -- my essay just published in The Feminist Wire as part of the Audre Lorde Forum celebrating her 80th Birthday. I was so honored to be invited and included in this powerful collection. During my final edits of the piece, I decided to start the essay reflecting on the power of her poetry and how much especially The Black Unicorn continues to be a force in my life -- especially the poem "A Woman Speaks" -- 

"I have been woman / for a long time / beware my smile / I am treacherous with old magic / and the noon’s new fury / with all your wide futures / promised / I am / woman / and not white."

-- which inspired the title of my essay... and here is the link:

"The Magic and Fury of Audre Lorde: Feminist Praxis and Pedagogy"

"i am not free while any woman is unfree, even when her shackles are very different from my own.
and i am not free as long as one person of color remains chained. nor is any one of you."
#audrelorde #blackunicorn #blacklivesmatter #toloveblacknessisradical #lovingdifference
*(on Instagram @sistellablack)*

"Caribbean Crossings, In Motion"

"Ancestral Rage" - Oil Pastel by Angelique V. Nixon

To the Caribbean, with love...

#dearcaribbean, CODE RED for Gender Justice, Caribbean Blog Carnival 

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"Caribbean Crossings, In Motion"

by Angelique V. Nixon

"What is the Caribbean in fact? A multiple series of relationships. We feel it, we express it in all kinds of hidden or twisted ways, or fiercely deny it. But we sense that this sea exists within us with its weight of now revealed islands." - Edouard Glissant, Caribbean Discourse 

I.

Under the surface, bursting

in my bloodlines

these genes of rememory

Trinidad feels like home

maybe I know here – this place

this space of my ancestors

I want to know about their lives,

my maternal great grandparents

what did they experience in these streets,

in these hills of Port of Spain, whispering to me

finally, you have returned,

we have been waiting

I know they moved to Inagua, Bahamas

these lines of African descent

movements across and inside

the Caribbean Sea, stories lost in motion

all I have is this picture of my great-gramma

in my head, a photograph mummy carried of you,

tall, poised, proud in brown flesh, long arms heavy

with salt, eyes full of wisdom, stature full of strength,

mouth curved and hard, from the experiences of your life

I will never know

but can wonder and imagine you,

wield you into an existence,

if only in my mind, if only on this page

these words come to me,

mummy telling me about you,

how you loved and held her up through

hard times, dreaming you into being,

the stories, these Caribbean gifts

of Anancy magic, walking with spirit

in this place, where I make sense

my face, my mix-up Blackness

my fyah, woman loving, cosmic warrior self.

II.

Jamaica, knows me

before I reach, get to know her

I was here before

by way of spirit, perhaps

through ancestors, for sure

my paternal great-grandfather

I hear much later through lost stories

moved to Nassau, Bahamas from Jamaica

by way of China, details submerged

like his memory

gramma born out of wedlock

these lines of Chinese descent

messy and spoken in secret shame

yet his blood rebukes this silence

haunting generations

mixed with great-grandmother’s

blurry ancestry and hushed tones

of Blackness, hidden through light-skin,

straight hair and light eyes,

separated from brown skin siblings,

these lines create forgetting

I trace myself back

through the streets of Kingston

seeing reflections, in motion

red, Black-Chiney, brown, mango skin, woman, sun kissed,

Bahamagal potcake, to make sense in this place,

rooting self in Reasonings at Blackspace, Woodside,

we people of the African Diaspora

I rememory for all of us (African, Asian, Indigenous)

diving into all we darkness

to make sense of we stories.

III.

Caribbean spaces of here and there, crossings,

linked through shared horrors and struggles, histories/herstories

(conquest, removal, slavery, the middle passage, death, plantation, 

labour, indentureship, another passage, colonization, control, 

migration, extraction, detention, occupation)

yet our differences, our uniqueness,

we be struggling still for emancipation

of our minds, bodies, and spaces

beyond geo-political-graphic location

spatially expanding, Caribbean communities

and identities striving to become whole

at home and abroad, rising with the tides

connective tissue around all these spaces

fiery mix up of people, cultures, languages

yet we twisted into silence and divisions

that serve us no longer

remember, the sea and bush know, we secrets

stories of defiance, strength, battles, rebels, trouble makers,

resistance, crossing lines of color, status, sex, and place,

from the magic of Boukman to Nanny and the Maroons

and Morant Bay Rebellion to the Grenadian Revolution

when we fought against slave masters, colonial walls, and oppression

fighting for we stolen lives, stolen stories, stolen resources

carving spaces for independence and self determination

but we still just surviving

when we need to thrive

and recreate we spaces to be

as complex and ever-changing as we see

interplay of being in motion – the past being ever present –

forging a future that is ours and free.

"We Resist" - Word Art, Oil Pastel by Angelique V. Nixon

for our blood, mixed

soon with their passion in sport,  

in indifference, in anger,

will create new soils, new souls, new

ancestors; will flow like this tide fixed

to the star by which this ship floats

to new worlds, new waters, new

harbours, the pride of our ancestors mixed 

with the wind and the water

the flesh and the flies, the whips and the fixed

fear of pain in this chained and welcoming port.

~ Kamau Brathwaite “New World A-Comin”