The Life of A Poem: Audre Lorde's "Litany for Survival" in Post-Lacrosse Durham
Author: Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Duke University
"The Life of A Poem" is a poetic and critical reflection on the relationship between the University and institutionalized economic, physical and sexual violence by Alexis Pauline Gumbs, a PhD candidate at Duke University, and a founding member of UBUNTU, an artistic and organizing community that emerged in Durham, NC during the Duke Lacrosse Scandal. In this article, Audre Lorde's "Litany for Survival" becomes a text of healing and a means through which to critically reframe community building and engaged scholarship.
Preface
Black lesbian poet, warrior, mother, scholar, activist, designer Audre Lorde published one of her most remembered poems, “A Litany for Survival” in her most remembered collection, The Black Unicorn, in 1978. A year later, Lorde found herself writing “Need: A Chorale for Black Women’s Voices” a poetic account of black women who did not survive, in response to the 12 murders of black women in Boston in the first three months of 1979. Barbara Smith, Audre Lorde and other members of the black lesbian socialist feminist Combahee River Collective used poetry in addition street art, marches and pamphlets to articulate a black feminist position that responded to the racist and sexist violence that black women in the United States experience.
Almost 30 years later in Durham, North Carolina, members of UBUNTU, a women-of-color, survivor-led coalition committed to ending gendered violence, drew upon both “Litany” and “Need” as healing texts amidst a media maelstrom of ideological violence against black women, sex workers, and survivors of sexual assault, triggered by the behavior of the Duke University Lacrosse team. Underneath the mainstream media and blog representations covering over and nearly smothering “post-lacrosse” Durham, these two texts by Lorde provided insurgent ground and healing for a collective of survivors committed to building a community that could replace the normalized violent relationship epitomized by Duke University’s support of renewed and continuing violence against women of color, sex workers, and survivors of sexual assault.
As a graduate student in the Duke University Department of English preparing for my qualifying exams at the moment that the silence about sexual violence in Durham broke, I had already committed myself to an academic focus on the poetry of Audre Lorde and that of her comrades and students as texts crucial to theorizing literary responses to violence. As a young black woman who had silently survived sexual assault on an elite university campus, I was in need of words that would allow me to speak before the wakening of my own voice. As a community organizer and artist committed to the life of Durham, North Carolina, I was part of a process of using these two texts (among others by Ntozake Shange, asha bandele and June Jordan) to perform healing and transform silence into interactive visioning in Durham, North Carolina.
This essay charts the life of the poem “A Litany for Survival” through the creative work of UBUNTU to respond to violent words and actions at Duke University. Reflecting on the underlying violence of the relationship between the university economy and the surrounding community through the more visible harm of sexual violence against oppressed people in this community, I offer that “survival” operates through an embodied and untimely poetics in tension with multiple forms of death.
·I·
(here)
For those of us who live at the shoreline...
We make our homes on the edges of campus relevance living in the bellies of libraries, charting out territory along the wall in the grooves made by century pressed stones against the grass that would grow here otherwise. We hover like mosquitoes alongside vultures. Tenuous, even though it is our labor that anchors this floating dream of thought.
Standing upon the constant edges of decision...
crucial and alone...
I never considered putting that blue four letter sticker on the car my stipend tried to pay for here. For an undergraduate student this place may feel like a resort, an asylum, a refuge from the pain of knowing. But for me, paid and imaginary, tokenized and flattered, the university remains a pile of stones, grounding a city that tries to breathe anyway.
for those of us who cannot indulge
the passing dreams of choice
Here, we trace the outlines of plantations, the daily tread of a silence bred by the fact that the University is the largest employer, the supplier of markets, the hulking power with all the money. Duke owns Durham, tax free. Buildings are heavy in our throats reminding us that the walls built on our wrists and ankles are the only way we survive.
who love in doorways coming and going
in the hours between dawns
I looked for my people on the shoreline, weathering the tide of summers, the whims of institutional vision. The single mother working at an overpriced organic grocery store who also runs a non-profit arts-based community organization inspired by the Black Panthers for Self-Defense. The elementary school teacher, painting murals at dawn. The part-time caterer making shrines to yemaya in the dark. The librarian making a zine while her daughter naps. The university typesetter practicing the guitar. The waitress charting revolutionary blueprints on the internet right now.
looking inward and outward
at once before and after
As a hybrid employee alien on the margins of the big house with the books inside I could not settle for, sleep with, thrive on the ghosts and bricks of institutional belonging. My mouth, my hands, my waking hours moved towards these other interlopers edging through, getting by, frantically thinking of some other way to be.
seeking a now
that can breed
futures
Only those of us out here on the shoreline can see how the endless tutoring programs and giving projects buy them a forgetfulness. As long as private research universities are exempt from property taxes and public schools are funded by property taxes there will a surplus of feel-good tutoring gigs to go around.
like bread in our children’s mouths
so their dreams will not reflect
Those of us who make our families here write grants in the langauge of subtle guilt, bright and fragile as tobacco leaves. Haunted by plantation replay in the giving hands of the administratively endowed, this city tries to breathe anyway. It is a threatened and threatening balance. Daring to dream futures, stooping to believe that the university is as good as the words it invents, here we are competitive, entreprenuerial, trying to find a creative way to relate to occupation.
the death of ours.
·II·
(then)
For those of us who were imprinted with fear...
So maybe we should have been ready. A single mother, a worker, a dancer, a student, a black woman in a city made up mostly of black women, wakes up dead. For those of us who know survival as a slow death, and know that there are infinite parts of us that an institution can kill one by one, death doesn’t mean it is over.
like a faint line in the center of our foreheads
learning to be afraid with our mother’s milk
Death means the way a group of people can use your body as if it is dirt, a chew toy, a sporting good, garbage to be recycled into adrenaline and forgetting. Something inside you gets mutilated and the people you ask for help, the media, the court, the landlord (which is) the university reminds you that you were never really alive or human. People send death threats to you and your family day in and day out, saying how dare you say “ouch,” how dare you make any sound here, how dare you remind us that you are alive.
for by this weapon
this illusion of some safety to be found
Those of us who had been silent about the assaults against our own opening waiting lives were vindicated. We ate the cruelty of being right. See. I was right to be silent; they never would have believed me. Look how they would have crucified me for any utterance. Look how they would have ravaged my family, opened my past. Look how they would have hammered me against the crossroads, built a shrine to their own innocence out of all my blood.
the heavy-footed hoped to silence us
A mother, a worker, a dancer, a student, an all-at-once person, we knew this woman was one of us. We woke up to how dead we were next to her and we dropped our pens, our paintbrushes, we didn’t know what to type or to say, how to eat or use the phone. We were shocked by our own dead bodies, surviving anyway, under stones of institutional innocence. We realized what we had been breathing was water all along, and we were chained to the stones of this reborn plantation. We couldn’t tell what time it was, what year, what screams we heard walking by thick proud trees. We didn’t know they were ours.
·III·
For all of us
Something broke in the stones upon our throats, because this woman, who should have been dead, dared to speak. Something broken in our hearts, opened passages in writing and indecipherable moaning. Something broke beside(s) that story over “spring break” in 2006. And after an unbearable moment, of not wanting to think about it, wanting it all to just go away, after time spent in closets and under beds hiding from what this meant about all of us, all of us—the writers, servers, teachers, students, clerks, receptionists, organizers, artists, parents, granddaughters, elders and kids—came out in the open where we could see each other and broke the silence. We admitted that we were brave enough to love and brave enough to be hurt. We admitted to strangers and long-time comrades secrets that we had been hiding like wounds in our hands. We have all been deeply hurt by sexual violence. We are hurt by it now. We are brave enough to stop it.
So UBUNTU, a women-of-color/survivor-led coalition committed to ending gendered violence emerged in a living room full of markers next to a potluck filled kitchen blocks away from the scene of the violence of the Duke Lacrosse team. And we moved into action, we who had already been leaders, but it was different than the leading we had done before. Personally, as someone who has been a vocal and active community organizer since I was 15 years old, I know that I had never learned to lead from the place of my greatest fear, deepest self-hatred, most wounded and scarred and intimate lining. I had never learned to lead, teach, organize, not even to walk and to breathe as a survivor of sexual violence.
A sustainability committee convened to create founding principles for the group, which named itself UBUNTU after the Swahili concept meaning “I am because we are.” We agreed that our group was not about capturing and punishing rapists. We understood that violence was cyclical; we understood that perpetrators were often survivors of sexual violence as well. We committed to the task of creating a community that could model and exemplify a different set of relations that could replace and erase the economic, spatial, racial, and gendered violence that made sexual violence likely, and disproportionately likely for oppressed people.
An education committee convened to create political education for the group. Starting with a session on the politics of sex work led by former sex workers, followed by a session on transpolitics led by trans members of the coalition, we met monthly for sessions on white supremacy, the defining of sexual assault, black feminist histories, ethics based on Sarah Hoagland’s text Lesbian Ethics, and non-violence. This committee also raised awareness about sexual violence in our community by screening Aishah Simmons’ film NO!: Black Women and Rape for specific communities. There was a screening just for women of color in Durham, a screening specifically for queer and trans-folks gathered from all over the SouthEast, a screening for the local black nationalist community, a screening for rape crisis service providers, etc. Simmons expressed full solidarity with our work and traveled to Durham for well-attended screenings at UNC-Chapel Hill and Bennett College for Women in Greensboro.
It was becoming more and more apparent that the relationship between sexual violence and the university was not just part of this contemporary media frenzy and my own personal pain. That semester I had the blessing to be an apprentice teacher with Charlotte Pierce-Baker, author of the breakthrough book Surviving the Silence: Black Women’s Stories of Rape in her course “Trauma, Violence and Women’s Writing.” I chose (really begged) to work with Dr. Pierce-Baker because she seemed to be accomplishing the impossible. How can one get up in front of a classroom of students and talk about all of the most difficult things you could ever talk about, all the most painful violences that affect us at once? How do you do that without scaring the students away or fainting from the sheer effort of it? Dr. Pierce-Baker was teaching about oppression, trauma and sexual violence with more grace than I had seen in any classroom. When the story of the Duke Lacrosse team’s violent behavior surfaced we were already mid-way through a semester long conversation about race, gender, sexuality and trauma, and what it had to do with women’s writing. Many of our students had experienced violence on Duke’s campus, and witnessed violence on and off campus. They bravely used the course as an opportunity to express and transform their own relationships to trauma. This was an especially brave act on a campus that was violently attacking a woman who had spoken out about rape and on which students were rallying around the idea that violence could never have been proven to happen, and even that violence against oppressed people did not matter as much as the eternal innocence of the privileged.
Early in the course I presented “A Litany for Survival” to the students and slowly but surely they began writing their own poems, testifying to and hoping for their own survival in the face of violence. I realized that teaching on a campus that condoned and ignored sexual violence enacted upon and by its students made the act of standing to lead a lecture or sitting to lead a seminar discussion even more scary than my fear of public speaking provided for. And though Audre Lorde’s poetry and essays are often read in isolation (like the rest of literature in the academy) as brilliant products of a brilliant mind, it changed everything for me when I realized that while Audre Lorde was writing the poems that I needed about violence and difference and survival and fear she was a teacher. And she wasn’t teaching just anyone. Audre Lorde was the first black teacher in the English department at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in the City University of New York from 1970-1979. This meant she was teaching police officers in full uniform including loaded guns during the most visible period of racist police violence in the history of New York City. No wonder she was an expert in the permutations of fear. Reading Audre Lorde and teaching about trauma at Duke University during the lacrosse “scandal” taught me that teaching, being accountable to a volatile and vulnerable audience of students changes everything. Honesty in that setting requires a poetic act of faith every single time.
UBUNTU focused a large amount of energy on nurturing the stories of women and especially women of color at the colleges in our areas. After all, this entire movement was sparked by the bravery of a black college student who was brave enough to speak out against the violence she had experienced. At the same time, it was very clear to us, that while college classrooms and programming could make a difference in the lives of individual women, the college campus was not a non-violent space nor was it conducive to sustained healing.
The site of healing would have to be created in our daily lives on and off campus. In our homes, in our relationships, and in our actions. UBUNTU held monthly healing sessions where we used writing, singing, dancing, touch, food and everything else we could think of to express and release our own experiences of violence and the ways they continued to live in our bodies. We created websites and publications about how to support survivors of sexual violence. We made a journal of healing, we made worksheets for our children. We took care of each other’s children, cooked for each other, ate together and danced and celebrated together to exemplify the community we needed. We emailed each other fifty times a day. With a broad coalition of organizations committed to economic justice, anti-racism, sex-worker rights, ending rape, and building community resources we organized a National Day of Truthtelling for April 28th 2007. We thought we were brand new.
this instant and this triumph
We didn’t remember, hadn’t been told, that almost 30 years earlier on April 28th a coalition of people led by women of color committed to ending gendered violence had gathered in Boston with signs and spirit. We knew and we didn’t know that on exactly that morning when the women in the Combahee River Collective and the other organizations that they mobilized gathered with signs reading “We Cannot Live Without Our Lives”1 and signs reading “8 Women Why Did They Die?”2 We certainly did not know until some later archival research that I conducted in the Sallie Bingham Collection at Duke that on the morning of their April 28th march the ninth murdered woman’s body was found. They had to change all the signs, they had to remember how to walk anyway. I went into the vaults looking for leads on autonomous black feminist publications and found that the same year that Barbara Smith and Lorraine Bethel edited the groundbreaking Conditions 5: The Black Women’s Issue which became Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology which led to the founding of Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, these same feminists were grappling with institutionally sanctioned violence in their community. Slowly pieced together from coverage in Off Our Backs, published journal entries from Barbara Smith and anthologies on violence against women, I found our legacy.3
We knew, and we didn’t know that our movement, our intentions, our beautiful declarations were necessary because they spoke to a continuing violence. The statement “Stop the Killing” proved not to be prophetic. A black woman was being killed even as they painted those signs. Bodies were turning up faster than they could change the typesetting on their pamphlet to protest it. Someone is experiencing sexual violence even as I write this. What we say is political, but our language is bereft, slapped down in the face of the persistence of violence. And for this reason our survival is not only political, it is poetic, creating languages we don’t have, pushing time to new relationships, holding the untimely truth that we are somehow here.
Today when I teach undergraduates that the black feminist publishing movement was an intentional response that the same black women who organized in response to the Boston killings invented because they didn’t expect to survive, and were determined to pass on their hard-earned lessons without succumbing to capitalist imperatives of the mainstream publishing industry, I am speaking a litany to survival. Every time I say, “In the first three months of 1979, 12 black women were killed in Boston,” I am railing against the deaths counted and uncounted that line our silence. I am telling my students that when they remember to speak out against the violence that they witness and experience on this campus, they will not be the first.4 Poetry may be the first language of their response.
we were never meant to survive.
·IV·
And when we speak....
Survival is not a gift. Survival is a struggle. A sharp and tense relationship, requisite in a system that does not affirm life. Or maybe survival is the way that life becomes more than our bodies. Maybe survival is the stains of that struggle left like pathmarks to hope behind us and ahead. Maybe survival is a kind of art. If so, it is even more crucial that amidst all the other committees that emerged in the work of UBUNTU an artistic response committee that focused on transformative healing through interactive poetic performances emerged as well.
And when the sun rises
And the creation of a coordinated and sustained artistic response to violence meant that instead of waking up early in the morning and literally sitting in a closet to transform my rage into sentences and theories, I could look forward to days of expression and invention. I could read the poems that were most important to me, and poems I had never heard aloud with a group of people equally unlikely to raise their voices in this place.
Practice is a particular type of poetic theorization. I can sit in the closet interrogating the rhythm structure, looking for the references, justifying the diction, but the question, how does this feel in my throat, how does this phrase coat her eyes, where does my pulse move between stanzas, what conversation does this poem make possible today and tomorrow can only come from the practical use of poetry to save our lives.
we are afraid
it might not remain
And when the sun sets
Ebony Golden, the initial co-pointperson of UBUNTU Artistic Response alongside me, called our meeting structure or lack thereof, a jazz approach. When she meant that she was invoking the jazz poems of Ntozake Shange and Jayne Cortez, each of whom use poetic improvisation to make the moment of the poem dynamically possible in conversation with a bassline or an idea they are riffing on.5 Our meetings jumped around and made their own agendas. We couldn’t remember who said what. Our voices overlapped in the refrain. Every piece of our lives needed to be recreated, held and tasted differently in the space our faith made. Everything was urgent and multiple, and this was not only reflected in the sound and length and food and frequency of our meetings, but also in the way we began to make the poetry audible. We started with intended harmonies and then learned to live like echoes in the space made by each other’s voices. We repeated each other’s sound into truth and recognition.
we are afraid
it might not rise in the morning
when our stomachs are full we are afraid
of indigestion
when our stomachs are empty
we are afraid
we may never eat again
And at the same time we had to nurture each other’s bodies, our everyday struggles, not only our sounds. We had to invent ways to honor the anniversaries of our babies who had died too soon. We had to shelter each other from homelessness. We had to feed each other. We had to send each other on journeys across countries and continents. We had to inhabit each other’s classrooms. We had to train each other to quilt, blog, sew, paint and wait. We had to nurture each other while nurturing a faith that poetry can do all that.
when we are loved
And most importantly we had to support our words in living outside the cocoon of our own understanding. So when Nayo Barbara Watkins (1939-2008), a leader in Alternate Roots and the founder of the Meykye Center for children with learning differences, asked us to “perform” at the main branch of the Durham Public Library, we pulled the song one of us had learned in Haitian dance class, the poem one of us had written for a great aunt Elsie, the poem one of us had written for Assata Shakur, the poem one of us had written for little sister Alex and made harmony and faith out of the meeting point of all of that....which was the poem “A Litany for Survival.”
And when the SouthEast Social Forum came to Durham North Carolina and filled the Hayti Heritage Center and North Carolina Central University with another possible world, our voices rang off the stained glass tribute to a scary looking so-called benefactor named William Duke and into the hearts of farmworkers, Appalachian environmentalists, immigrants, youth, elders, workers for black justice, artists, lovers and whoever else was gathered there. Audre Lorde’s words were the way to collectivize our very personal, very intimate movement. “For all of us,” she wrote “this instant and this triumph.”
And throughout that year we enacted interactive poetry performances where participants made and transformed poems in a way that allowed them to express their survival and act on their healing in university classrooms, auditoriums, living rooms, historical sites, parks, chapels, and sidewalks in North Carolina. We made altars that visually poeticized places that were important to us: like the house that the Lacrosse team used to live in, and the abandoned gas station across from the new gentrifying lofts downtown and our own porches, notebooks and bodies.
Meanwhile as teaching assistant/cheerleader for the Women’s Studies honors thesis candidates, I used the same media, t-shirts, food, sidewalk art, and music to guide three brilliant young women through a process of what it meant to speak their truths on the terms of academia.
we are afraid
But it took UBUNTU a full year, right up to the U.S. Social Forum for us to internalize the bravery we had been reaching towards and teaching about all along. We had proposed to once again invoke Audre Lorde’s words with our bodies and faith and suddenly we realized it wasn’t enough. We realized that we had tried to stop moving through our transition and it was at the U.S. Social Forum in Atlanta, Georgia that we moved beyond tribute through poem, and poems of tribute to sharing and ritualizing our own stories of survival and healing in sound. We were out there, shaking and unready, meaning to do what had never been meant.
love will vanish
And our brave (un)readiness was necessary because the world and the law were wolves and reminders that we should not survive. That we should not pretend to be alive. On blogs, in newspapers, in marches, on t-shirts were memos to us to remember that we were dead. Or that we should be. And in this climate, which insisted that survivors should not trouble the world with the good and horrible news of our survival, all charges were dropped against the specific members of the lacrosse team who had been indicted. Survivors everywhere were reminded that to speak our truth was to be called “liar” and that to remember our names was to be called out of them.
when we are alone we are afraid
love will never return
And in that moment of recognition (because we always knew that the violence of the law would not be effective in ending violence against us) and that moment of disbelief (because reminders of our own expendability are still shocking, assertions that we don’t exist are still jarring) we sent each other poems, essays, flyers and statements, without coordinating it in advance. And each of our statements were survivals of June Jordan’s “Poem About My Rights” which we soon compiled into an interactive anthology called “Wrong is Not My Name” with space for newspaper collages, and resources for survivors, which we distributed by hand across the country and which is available for free download even now.
And when we speak
Because the presence of these statements in print and the act of writing through our call and response was crucial and in every workshop participants made their own poems, and we made collective poems, and our every utterance was food for someone somewhere, was medicine for someone somewhere (to paraphrase the writer Zelda Lockhart).
we are afraid
our words will not be heard nor welcomed
But when we are silent
we are still afraid.
So it is better to speak
And women of color in Texas wrote us to tell us how our work had inspired them to create writing circles for survivors of sexual violence, and a pregnant woman on the West Bank told us how she was going to use the model spread through the internet by BrokenBeautiful Press to lead zine-making workshops for Isreali and Palestinian women interested in peace, and a student in South Africa told us how she was going to use our worksheets to help out in a school in an abandoned building created by black South African mothers during the general strike and just last month the Shakti Center in Chennai, India decided they would make publications together as a way to think newly about gender and sexuality. Those words are the way that we know it is worth it.
·V·
Remembering...
Sylvia Wynter says that the poetic is the way we create a desired world, by naming our position and relationship within this one. In this sense, there is no better way to theorize a poem than by poeticizing the movements it enables. A theorization of Audre Lorde’s “A Litany for Survival” requires an examination of what it means to speak into the impossible, into death threats and silences and into an institutional context (the plantation/university) that makes theory both valuable and dangerous. The theoretical call of the poem is a lived process, a pedagogical process. In this case, I learned, we learned that the poetic means we exist.
Working with UBUNTU, holding old poems in my mouth with new participatory audiences, immersed me in the spiritual practice that has sustained me through most of my dissertation tentatively titled “Never Meant to Survive.” The testing ground of my own life, in community and collaboration, taught me that black feminists used poetry to create new languages out of death sentences. I believe that poems are packets of medicine sent through generations when books don’t stay in print and poets die young because they can’t afford healthcare. In UBUNTU both the ideas and the practices of the radical black feminist writers and publishers that I study in my dissertation survive. Their approaches to radical mothering, teaching, and independent publishing inform our ongoing work.
Additionally, this past fall semester I taught a course at Bennett College, a historically black college for women in Greensboro, NC entitled “Letters to Audre” and this summer I am facilitating a community study group called “Summer of Our Lorde” both of which are designed to allow students and community members to engage Audre Lorde’s words in the face of the present atmosphere in which violence against women of color is reported (or not reported) again and again on the news. Poetry teaches us that truth is reflexive and always still in the making.
There is no better way to say it than to say it:
We were never meant to survive.
Notes:
1 A statement by Barbara Deming, later invoked by Audre Lorde as the last words in “Need.”
2 Also the title of the publication that the Combahee River Collective Published “6 Women Why Did They Die?” They had to adjust the title as more and more women were killed in this short period.
3 See for example Margo Culley, ed. A Day at A Time: The Diary Literature of American Women from 1764 to the Present. New York: The Feminist Press, 1985 and Jill Radford and Diane Russell eds. Femicide: The Politics of Woman Killing. New York: Twayne, 1992.
4 And I am sad to say that the vast majority of the students I have taught here have experienced or witnessed racist, gendered and sexualized violence on this campus.
5 See for example Ntozake Shange. A Daughter’s Geography. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1983 and Jayne Cortez. Mouth on Paper. New York: Bola Press, 1977.
"The Life of A Poem" is a poetic and critical reflection on the relationship between the University and institutionalized economic, physical and sexual violence by Alexis Pauline Gumbs, a PhD candidate at Duke University, and a founding member of UBUNTU, an artistic and organizing community that emerged in Durham, NC during the Duke Lacrosse Scandal. In this article, Audre Lorde's "Litany for Survival" becomes a text of healing and a means through which to critically reframe community building and engaged scholarship.
Preface
Black lesbian poet, warrior, mother, scholar, activist, designer Audre Lorde published one of her most remembered poems, “A Litany for Survival” in her most remembered collection, The Black Unicorn, in 1978. A year later, Lorde found herself writing “Need: A Chorale for Black Women’s Voices” a poetic account of black women who did not survive, in response to the 12 murders of black women in Boston in the first three months of 1979. Barbara Smith, Audre Lorde and other members of the black lesbian socialist feminist Combahee River Collective used poetry in addition street art, marches and pamphlets to articulate a black feminist position that responded to the racist and sexist violence that black women in the United States experience.
Almost 30 years later in Durham, North Carolina, members of UBUNTU, a women-of-color, survivor-led coalition committed to ending gendered violence, drew upon both “Litany” and “Need” as healing texts amidst a media maelstrom of ideological violence against black women, sex workers, and survivors of sexual assault, triggered by the behavior of the Duke University Lacrosse team. Underneath the mainstream media and blog representations covering over and nearly smothering “post-lacrosse” Durham, these two texts by Lorde provided insurgent ground and healing for a collective of survivors committed to building a community that could replace the normalized violent relationship epitomized by Duke University’s support of renewed and continuing violence against women of color, sex workers, and survivors of sexual assault.
As a graduate student in the Duke University Department of English preparing for my qualifying exams at the moment that the silence about sexual violence in Durham broke, I had already committed myself to an academic focus on the poetry of Audre Lorde and that of her comrades and students as texts crucial to theorizing literary responses to violence. As a young black woman who had silently survived sexual assault on an elite university campus, I was in need of words that would allow me to speak before the wakening of my own voice. As a community organizer and artist committed to the life of Durham, North Carolina, I was part of a process of using these two texts (among others by Ntozake Shange, asha bandele and June Jordan) to perform healing and transform silence into interactive visioning in Durham, North Carolina.
This essay charts the life of the poem “A Litany for Survival” through the creative work of UBUNTU to respond to violent words and actions at Duke University. Reflecting on the underlying violence of the relationship between the university economy and the surrounding community through the more visible harm of sexual violence against oppressed people in this community, I offer that “survival” operates through an embodied and untimely poetics in tension with multiple forms of death.
·I·
(here)
For those of us who live at the shoreline...
We make our homes on the edges of campus relevance living in the bellies of libraries, charting out territory along the wall in the grooves made by century pressed stones against the grass that would grow here otherwise. We hover like mosquitoes alongside vultures. Tenuous, even though it is our labor that anchors this floating dream of thought.
Standing upon the constant edges of decision...
crucial and alone...
I never considered putting that blue four letter sticker on the car my stipend tried to pay for here. For an undergraduate student this place may feel like a resort, an asylum, a refuge from the pain of knowing. But for me, paid and imaginary, tokenized and flattered, the university remains a pile of stones, grounding a city that tries to breathe anyway.
for those of us who cannot indulge
the passing dreams of choice
Here, we trace the outlines of plantations, the daily tread of a silence bred by the fact that the University is the largest employer, the supplier of markets, the hulking power with all the money. Duke owns Durham, tax free. Buildings are heavy in our throats reminding us that the walls built on our wrists and ankles are the only way we survive.
who love in doorways coming and going
in the hours between dawns
I looked for my people on the shoreline, weathering the tide of summers, the whims of institutional vision. The single mother working at an overpriced organic grocery store who also runs a non-profit arts-based community organization inspired by the Black Panthers for Self-Defense. The elementary school teacher, painting murals at dawn. The part-time caterer making shrines to yemaya in the dark. The librarian making a zine while her daughter naps. The university typesetter practicing the guitar. The waitress charting revolutionary blueprints on the internet right now.
looking inward and outward
at once before and after
As a hybrid employee alien on the margins of the big house with the books inside I could not settle for, sleep with, thrive on the ghosts and bricks of institutional belonging. My mouth, my hands, my waking hours moved towards these other interlopers edging through, getting by, frantically thinking of some other way to be.
seeking a now
that can breed
futures
Only those of us out here on the shoreline can see how the endless tutoring programs and giving projects buy them a forgetfulness. As long as private research universities are exempt from property taxes and public schools are funded by property taxes there will a surplus of feel-good tutoring gigs to go around.
like bread in our children’s mouths
so their dreams will not reflect
Those of us who make our families here write grants in the langauge of subtle guilt, bright and fragile as tobacco leaves. Haunted by plantation replay in the giving hands of the administratively endowed, this city tries to breathe anyway. It is a threatened and threatening balance. Daring to dream futures, stooping to believe that the university is as good as the words it invents, here we are competitive, entreprenuerial, trying to find a creative way to relate to occupation.
the death of ours.
·II·
(then)
For those of us who were imprinted with fear...
So maybe we should have been ready. A single mother, a worker, a dancer, a student, a black woman in a city made up mostly of black women, wakes up dead. For those of us who know survival as a slow death, and know that there are infinite parts of us that an institution can kill one by one, death doesn’t mean it is over.
like a faint line in the center of our foreheads
learning to be afraid with our mother’s milk
Death means the way a group of people can use your body as if it is dirt, a chew toy, a sporting good, garbage to be recycled into adrenaline and forgetting. Something inside you gets mutilated and the people you ask for help, the media, the court, the landlord (which is) the university reminds you that you were never really alive or human. People send death threats to you and your family day in and day out, saying how dare you say “ouch,” how dare you make any sound here, how dare you remind us that you are alive.
for by this weapon
this illusion of some safety to be found
Those of us who had been silent about the assaults against our own opening waiting lives were vindicated. We ate the cruelty of being right. See. I was right to be silent; they never would have believed me. Look how they would have crucified me for any utterance. Look how they would have ravaged my family, opened my past. Look how they would have hammered me against the crossroads, built a shrine to their own innocence out of all my blood.
the heavy-footed hoped to silence us
A mother, a worker, a dancer, a student, an all-at-once person, we knew this woman was one of us. We woke up to how dead we were next to her and we dropped our pens, our paintbrushes, we didn’t know what to type or to say, how to eat or use the phone. We were shocked by our own dead bodies, surviving anyway, under stones of institutional innocence. We realized what we had been breathing was water all along, and we were chained to the stones of this reborn plantation. We couldn’t tell what time it was, what year, what screams we heard walking by thick proud trees. We didn’t know they were ours.
·III·
For all of us
Something broke in the stones upon our throats, because this woman, who should have been dead, dared to speak. Something broken in our hearts, opened passages in writing and indecipherable moaning. Something broke beside(s) that story over “spring break” in 2006. And after an unbearable moment, of not wanting to think about it, wanting it all to just go away, after time spent in closets and under beds hiding from what this meant about all of us, all of us—the writers, servers, teachers, students, clerks, receptionists, organizers, artists, parents, granddaughters, elders and kids—came out in the open where we could see each other and broke the silence. We admitted that we were brave enough to love and brave enough to be hurt. We admitted to strangers and long-time comrades secrets that we had been hiding like wounds in our hands. We have all been deeply hurt by sexual violence. We are hurt by it now. We are brave enough to stop it.
So UBUNTU, a women-of-color/survivor-led coalition committed to ending gendered violence emerged in a living room full of markers next to a potluck filled kitchen blocks away from the scene of the violence of the Duke Lacrosse team. And we moved into action, we who had already been leaders, but it was different than the leading we had done before. Personally, as someone who has been a vocal and active community organizer since I was 15 years old, I know that I had never learned to lead from the place of my greatest fear, deepest self-hatred, most wounded and scarred and intimate lining. I had never learned to lead, teach, organize, not even to walk and to breathe as a survivor of sexual violence.
A sustainability committee convened to create founding principles for the group, which named itself UBUNTU after the Swahili concept meaning “I am because we are.” We agreed that our group was not about capturing and punishing rapists. We understood that violence was cyclical; we understood that perpetrators were often survivors of sexual violence as well. We committed to the task of creating a community that could model and exemplify a different set of relations that could replace and erase the economic, spatial, racial, and gendered violence that made sexual violence likely, and disproportionately likely for oppressed people.
An education committee convened to create political education for the group. Starting with a session on the politics of sex work led by former sex workers, followed by a session on transpolitics led by trans members of the coalition, we met monthly for sessions on white supremacy, the defining of sexual assault, black feminist histories, ethics based on Sarah Hoagland’s text Lesbian Ethics, and non-violence. This committee also raised awareness about sexual violence in our community by screening Aishah Simmons’ film NO!: Black Women and Rape for specific communities. There was a screening just for women of color in Durham, a screening specifically for queer and trans-folks gathered from all over the SouthEast, a screening for the local black nationalist community, a screening for rape crisis service providers, etc. Simmons expressed full solidarity with our work and traveled to Durham for well-attended screenings at UNC-Chapel Hill and Bennett College for Women in Greensboro.
It was becoming more and more apparent that the relationship between sexual violence and the university was not just part of this contemporary media frenzy and my own personal pain. That semester I had the blessing to be an apprentice teacher with Charlotte Pierce-Baker, author of the breakthrough book Surviving the Silence: Black Women’s Stories of Rape in her course “Trauma, Violence and Women’s Writing.” I chose (really begged) to work with Dr. Pierce-Baker because she seemed to be accomplishing the impossible. How can one get up in front of a classroom of students and talk about all of the most difficult things you could ever talk about, all the most painful violences that affect us at once? How do you do that without scaring the students away or fainting from the sheer effort of it? Dr. Pierce-Baker was teaching about oppression, trauma and sexual violence with more grace than I had seen in any classroom. When the story of the Duke Lacrosse team’s violent behavior surfaced we were already mid-way through a semester long conversation about race, gender, sexuality and trauma, and what it had to do with women’s writing. Many of our students had experienced violence on Duke’s campus, and witnessed violence on and off campus. They bravely used the course as an opportunity to express and transform their own relationships to trauma. This was an especially brave act on a campus that was violently attacking a woman who had spoken out about rape and on which students were rallying around the idea that violence could never have been proven to happen, and even that violence against oppressed people did not matter as much as the eternal innocence of the privileged.
Early in the course I presented “A Litany for Survival” to the students and slowly but surely they began writing their own poems, testifying to and hoping for their own survival in the face of violence. I realized that teaching on a campus that condoned and ignored sexual violence enacted upon and by its students made the act of standing to lead a lecture or sitting to lead a seminar discussion even more scary than my fear of public speaking provided for. And though Audre Lorde’s poetry and essays are often read in isolation (like the rest of literature in the academy) as brilliant products of a brilliant mind, it changed everything for me when I realized that while Audre Lorde was writing the poems that I needed about violence and difference and survival and fear she was a teacher. And she wasn’t teaching just anyone. Audre Lorde was the first black teacher in the English department at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in the City University of New York from 1970-1979. This meant she was teaching police officers in full uniform including loaded guns during the most visible period of racist police violence in the history of New York City. No wonder she was an expert in the permutations of fear. Reading Audre Lorde and teaching about trauma at Duke University during the lacrosse “scandal” taught me that teaching, being accountable to a volatile and vulnerable audience of students changes everything. Honesty in that setting requires a poetic act of faith every single time.
UBUNTU focused a large amount of energy on nurturing the stories of women and especially women of color at the colleges in our areas. After all, this entire movement was sparked by the bravery of a black college student who was brave enough to speak out against the violence she had experienced. At the same time, it was very clear to us, that while college classrooms and programming could make a difference in the lives of individual women, the college campus was not a non-violent space nor was it conducive to sustained healing.
The site of healing would have to be created in our daily lives on and off campus. In our homes, in our relationships, and in our actions. UBUNTU held monthly healing sessions where we used writing, singing, dancing, touch, food and everything else we could think of to express and release our own experiences of violence and the ways they continued to live in our bodies. We created websites and publications about how to support survivors of sexual violence. We made a journal of healing, we made worksheets for our children. We took care of each other’s children, cooked for each other, ate together and danced and celebrated together to exemplify the community we needed. We emailed each other fifty times a day. With a broad coalition of organizations committed to economic justice, anti-racism, sex-worker rights, ending rape, and building community resources we organized a National Day of Truthtelling for April 28th 2007. We thought we were brand new.
this instant and this triumph
We didn’t remember, hadn’t been told, that almost 30 years earlier on April 28th a coalition of people led by women of color committed to ending gendered violence had gathered in Boston with signs and spirit. We knew and we didn’t know that on exactly that morning when the women in the Combahee River Collective and the other organizations that they mobilized gathered with signs reading “We Cannot Live Without Our Lives”1 and signs reading “8 Women Why Did They Die?”2 We certainly did not know until some later archival research that I conducted in the Sallie Bingham Collection at Duke that on the morning of their April 28th march the ninth murdered woman’s body was found. They had to change all the signs, they had to remember how to walk anyway. I went into the vaults looking for leads on autonomous black feminist publications and found that the same year that Barbara Smith and Lorraine Bethel edited the groundbreaking Conditions 5: The Black Women’s Issue which became Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology which led to the founding of Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, these same feminists were grappling with institutionally sanctioned violence in their community. Slowly pieced together from coverage in Off Our Backs, published journal entries from Barbara Smith and anthologies on violence against women, I found our legacy.3
We knew, and we didn’t know that our movement, our intentions, our beautiful declarations were necessary because they spoke to a continuing violence. The statement “Stop the Killing” proved not to be prophetic. A black woman was being killed even as they painted those signs. Bodies were turning up faster than they could change the typesetting on their pamphlet to protest it. Someone is experiencing sexual violence even as I write this. What we say is political, but our language is bereft, slapped down in the face of the persistence of violence. And for this reason our survival is not only political, it is poetic, creating languages we don’t have, pushing time to new relationships, holding the untimely truth that we are somehow here.
Today when I teach undergraduates that the black feminist publishing movement was an intentional response that the same black women who organized in response to the Boston killings invented because they didn’t expect to survive, and were determined to pass on their hard-earned lessons without succumbing to capitalist imperatives of the mainstream publishing industry, I am speaking a litany to survival. Every time I say, “In the first three months of 1979, 12 black women were killed in Boston,” I am railing against the deaths counted and uncounted that line our silence. I am telling my students that when they remember to speak out against the violence that they witness and experience on this campus, they will not be the first.4 Poetry may be the first language of their response.
we were never meant to survive.
·IV·
And when we speak....
Survival is not a gift. Survival is a struggle. A sharp and tense relationship, requisite in a system that does not affirm life. Or maybe survival is the way that life becomes more than our bodies. Maybe survival is the stains of that struggle left like pathmarks to hope behind us and ahead. Maybe survival is a kind of art. If so, it is even more crucial that amidst all the other committees that emerged in the work of UBUNTU an artistic response committee that focused on transformative healing through interactive poetic performances emerged as well.
And when the sun rises
And the creation of a coordinated and sustained artistic response to violence meant that instead of waking up early in the morning and literally sitting in a closet to transform my rage into sentences and theories, I could look forward to days of expression and invention. I could read the poems that were most important to me, and poems I had never heard aloud with a group of people equally unlikely to raise their voices in this place.
Practice is a particular type of poetic theorization. I can sit in the closet interrogating the rhythm structure, looking for the references, justifying the diction, but the question, how does this feel in my throat, how does this phrase coat her eyes, where does my pulse move between stanzas, what conversation does this poem make possible today and tomorrow can only come from the practical use of poetry to save our lives.
we are afraid
it might not remain
And when the sun sets
Ebony Golden, the initial co-pointperson of UBUNTU Artistic Response alongside me, called our meeting structure or lack thereof, a jazz approach. When she meant that she was invoking the jazz poems of Ntozake Shange and Jayne Cortez, each of whom use poetic improvisation to make the moment of the poem dynamically possible in conversation with a bassline or an idea they are riffing on.5 Our meetings jumped around and made their own agendas. We couldn’t remember who said what. Our voices overlapped in the refrain. Every piece of our lives needed to be recreated, held and tasted differently in the space our faith made. Everything was urgent and multiple, and this was not only reflected in the sound and length and food and frequency of our meetings, but also in the way we began to make the poetry audible. We started with intended harmonies and then learned to live like echoes in the space made by each other’s voices. We repeated each other’s sound into truth and recognition.
we are afraid
it might not rise in the morning
when our stomachs are full we are afraid
of indigestion
when our stomachs are empty
we are afraid
we may never eat again
And at the same time we had to nurture each other’s bodies, our everyday struggles, not only our sounds. We had to invent ways to honor the anniversaries of our babies who had died too soon. We had to shelter each other from homelessness. We had to feed each other. We had to send each other on journeys across countries and continents. We had to inhabit each other’s classrooms. We had to train each other to quilt, blog, sew, paint and wait. We had to nurture each other while nurturing a faith that poetry can do all that.
when we are loved
And most importantly we had to support our words in living outside the cocoon of our own understanding. So when Nayo Barbara Watkins (1939-2008), a leader in Alternate Roots and the founder of the Meykye Center for children with learning differences, asked us to “perform” at the main branch of the Durham Public Library, we pulled the song one of us had learned in Haitian dance class, the poem one of us had written for a great aunt Elsie, the poem one of us had written for Assata Shakur, the poem one of us had written for little sister Alex and made harmony and faith out of the meeting point of all of that....which was the poem “A Litany for Survival.”
And when the SouthEast Social Forum came to Durham North Carolina and filled the Hayti Heritage Center and North Carolina Central University with another possible world, our voices rang off the stained glass tribute to a scary looking so-called benefactor named William Duke and into the hearts of farmworkers, Appalachian environmentalists, immigrants, youth, elders, workers for black justice, artists, lovers and whoever else was gathered there. Audre Lorde’s words were the way to collectivize our very personal, very intimate movement. “For all of us,” she wrote “this instant and this triumph.”
And throughout that year we enacted interactive poetry performances where participants made and transformed poems in a way that allowed them to express their survival and act on their healing in university classrooms, auditoriums, living rooms, historical sites, parks, chapels, and sidewalks in North Carolina. We made altars that visually poeticized places that were important to us: like the house that the Lacrosse team used to live in, and the abandoned gas station across from the new gentrifying lofts downtown and our own porches, notebooks and bodies.
Meanwhile as teaching assistant/cheerleader for the Women’s Studies honors thesis candidates, I used the same media, t-shirts, food, sidewalk art, and music to guide three brilliant young women through a process of what it meant to speak their truths on the terms of academia.
we are afraid
But it took UBUNTU a full year, right up to the U.S. Social Forum for us to internalize the bravery we had been reaching towards and teaching about all along. We had proposed to once again invoke Audre Lorde’s words with our bodies and faith and suddenly we realized it wasn’t enough. We realized that we had tried to stop moving through our transition and it was at the U.S. Social Forum in Atlanta, Georgia that we moved beyond tribute through poem, and poems of tribute to sharing and ritualizing our own stories of survival and healing in sound. We were out there, shaking and unready, meaning to do what had never been meant.
love will vanish
And our brave (un)readiness was necessary because the world and the law were wolves and reminders that we should not survive. That we should not pretend to be alive. On blogs, in newspapers, in marches, on t-shirts were memos to us to remember that we were dead. Or that we should be. And in this climate, which insisted that survivors should not trouble the world with the good and horrible news of our survival, all charges were dropped against the specific members of the lacrosse team who had been indicted. Survivors everywhere were reminded that to speak our truth was to be called “liar” and that to remember our names was to be called out of them.
when we are alone we are afraid
love will never return
And in that moment of recognition (because we always knew that the violence of the law would not be effective in ending violence against us) and that moment of disbelief (because reminders of our own expendability are still shocking, assertions that we don’t exist are still jarring) we sent each other poems, essays, flyers and statements, without coordinating it in advance. And each of our statements were survivals of June Jordan’s “Poem About My Rights” which we soon compiled into an interactive anthology called “Wrong is Not My Name” with space for newspaper collages, and resources for survivors, which we distributed by hand across the country and which is available for free download even now.
And when we speak
Because the presence of these statements in print and the act of writing through our call and response was crucial and in every workshop participants made their own poems, and we made collective poems, and our every utterance was food for someone somewhere, was medicine for someone somewhere (to paraphrase the writer Zelda Lockhart).
we are afraid
our words will not be heard nor welcomed
But when we are silent
we are still afraid.
So it is better to speak
And women of color in Texas wrote us to tell us how our work had inspired them to create writing circles for survivors of sexual violence, and a pregnant woman on the West Bank told us how she was going to use the model spread through the internet by BrokenBeautiful Press to lead zine-making workshops for Isreali and Palestinian women interested in peace, and a student in South Africa told us how she was going to use our worksheets to help out in a school in an abandoned building created by black South African mothers during the general strike and just last month the Shakti Center in Chennai, India decided they would make publications together as a way to think newly about gender and sexuality. Those words are the way that we know it is worth it.
·V·
Remembering...
Sylvia Wynter says that the poetic is the way we create a desired world, by naming our position and relationship within this one. In this sense, there is no better way to theorize a poem than by poeticizing the movements it enables. A theorization of Audre Lorde’s “A Litany for Survival” requires an examination of what it means to speak into the impossible, into death threats and silences and into an institutional context (the plantation/university) that makes theory both valuable and dangerous. The theoretical call of the poem is a lived process, a pedagogical process. In this case, I learned, we learned that the poetic means we exist.
Working with UBUNTU, holding old poems in my mouth with new participatory audiences, immersed me in the spiritual practice that has sustained me through most of my dissertation tentatively titled “Never Meant to Survive.” The testing ground of my own life, in community and collaboration, taught me that black feminists used poetry to create new languages out of death sentences. I believe that poems are packets of medicine sent through generations when books don’t stay in print and poets die young because they can’t afford healthcare. In UBUNTU both the ideas and the practices of the radical black feminist writers and publishers that I study in my dissertation survive. Their approaches to radical mothering, teaching, and independent publishing inform our ongoing work.
Additionally, this past fall semester I taught a course at Bennett College, a historically black college for women in Greensboro, NC entitled “Letters to Audre” and this summer I am facilitating a community study group called “Summer of Our Lorde” both of which are designed to allow students and community members to engage Audre Lorde’s words in the face of the present atmosphere in which violence against women of color is reported (or not reported) again and again on the news. Poetry teaches us that truth is reflexive and always still in the making.
There is no better way to say it than to say it:
We were never meant to survive.
Notes:
1 A statement by Barbara Deming, later invoked by Audre Lorde as the last words in “Need.”
2 Also the title of the publication that the Combahee River Collective Published “6 Women Why Did They Die?” They had to adjust the title as more and more women were killed in this short period.
3 See for example Margo Culley, ed. A Day at A Time: The Diary Literature of American Women from 1764 to the Present. New York: The Feminist Press, 1985 and Jill Radford and Diane Russell eds. Femicide: The Politics of Woman Killing. New York: Twayne, 1992.
4 And I am sad to say that the vast majority of the students I have taught here have experienced or witnessed racist, gendered and sexualized violence on this campus.
5 See for example Ntozake Shange. A Daughter’s Geography. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1983 and Jayne Cortez. Mouth on Paper. New York: Bola Press, 1977.
posted by kandi111777 at
11:01 AM
2 Comments:
Oh, this is so incredible, Lexi!
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