Love letters to looters

Dear Me/We/You/Us

Under strict loving soft encouragement from the QBG I am writing us a love letter. And the things I love about ourselves and myself and weselves and multiple selves on multiple plains/planes.

The first part of y/our love letter of course is a love letter to our inability to do the assignment , any assignment as it is asked.

When I started this letter I had as I usually do grand plans of combining it with a stinging commentary on Haiti/an admonishment to American progressive laziness/ response to stupid stupid lady who knows nothing about black new media feminism/and a love letter to all of you I carry with me .

I think I started with the idea of combining them because of of something Delux wrote that I the idea that our very exisistance is multi tasked . While hers is of course based on the Dubois talented tenth Not just inter sectional as in existing , but that every breath or motion exists in our bodies and lives at multiple sometimes oppositional ends.

and that attempts to sustain this existence in any form are transgressive always or confrontational or violent where they are none.

One of the things I love about me is my appearance to be anywhere BUT my own country it seems.

I am Senegalese/Creole/Dominican/Brazilian/Carolina Geechee/ DEFINITELY west indian but NOT Guyanese

and Haitian

I may say it's the french but it's often before I open my mouth.

And it is often well lets be realistic most of the time that my radical self screams and chafes and just rages at the idea of being categorized without my permission , my ever awkward self demanding that peopel recognize teh one thing I often feel I have to call my own

but my nun /self the self that is always trying to be open and good and present

that self sees people looking for home for familiarity for knowledge in you in unfamiliar places.

From kids from your hood in the museum

foreigners well damn near everywhere

people find home in you even when you can't find it in yourself

i love that you fixate on words on ideas on concepts . That this letter is called a love letter to looting because you jsut can;t satnd that it's being used to describe people trying not to die.

Because you feel it in the pit of your stomach that it's what we have been called all our lives.

Looting someones "spot" by daring to be brighter
Looting someones comfort by daring to be hurt at a slight
Looting someone's success by daring to point out flaws
Looting the movement by daring to not work for free.
Looting your own future by daring to survive instead of " trying to do something better with your life"

Because in the end no one pays your bills feeds your family hears your cry makes your Damoclean choices

and because most off you just know it's looking looking for a way to organize a world that does not believe in you for your proper existence. That we understand that often being incomprehensible is a nice way of being dismissible

I think That is what I thought of when I read Lex's email and facebook post. That at the crux of it most of the problem isn;t actually ignorance, or meanness but shear incomprehensibility.

That we write create our media and push our lives in ways that are deemed " small"

because none of those women can imagine having to constantly reclaim your life your humanity every generation every new birth .

That sometimes yelling at Rupert Murdoch , or snarling at each other about whose incharge

can never mean as much as turning to saying .

"I see you , I hear you , and there is no wrong in your existence"

Even as you try to make yourself understand that.

I love that you even dare to try.

I love that you greet things and developments that match your Cassandra like propensity for prediction with equal measure of curse and hug. That you enjoy being right without relishing it,

I love that you erased that last sentence , You're learning!

I truly love your relish in being wrong . Because you wish to learn, you are open, you are fearfilled and that gives you courage.

I love you not because you are perfect or a specimen or a goddess but because you are you

love

Me and You and All of you

15 days - For baby honey on CNN

for "honey" the 15 day old baby in Dr. Gupta's arms on CNN. Please give.

AYITI

15 days
her skin
like a drop of chocolate
formed
perfect
by
god

15 days
in her own image

15 days
by his own hand

15 days
in zher own heart

15 days
from freedom’s own
land

15 days
her skin
perfect
plum purple black

15 days
thinking of oni
that perfect whole package
tomorrow i will be
beautiful
answer yes
when they ask
and she
is

15days
chocolate honey
perfect plum
hungry

15 days
perfect package
food for
my soul
denied
wondering

15 days
is
their
food for
her
belly

15 days
reaching
for
her

I didn’t know she was mine

Mary Daly

Mary Daly was a pioneer. She pushed a reexamination of patriarchal monotheism , the reexamination and ascension of the feminine . Beyond God the Father was earth shattering academically . Her time at Boston College was revolutionary in terms of theology and exploding the boundaries of what a classroom could be . Many feminist and more feminine central theological practices and beliefs begin with her. Her work moved spirituality to whole nother PLAINS for feminism. FULL STOP.

Mary Daly was a horrific HORRIFIC transphobe. Much of her writing towards trans people operated under a concurrent belief that as a woman her calls for the acceptance of or the desire to institute a kind of violence that from the mouths of any one with more institutional power would be openly GALLING and TERRIFYING are shunted to the side because people have no desire to look beyond her original books. They advocate persecution abuse and horrific actions.

Mary Daly perpetrated and continued racism . Her methodology for Gyn/(e)cology was flawed and problematic. Her ( and many of her supporters ) justifications for that methodology was dripping DRIPPING in white privilege . It was condescending off putting and obstructive to building any kind of framework with MULTIPLE scholars of color. Audre Lorde was the one that got her " caught".


These three things if formatting could allow would be next to each other in importance, one is not more important to the other to me.

I have that option . I am a cis gndered straight reasonably religious young radical/WOC . I have those privileges and intersectionalities.

I know that there has been internet kerfluffle on Mary Daly which I am not linking to because it's 2010 and I just need to tamp it down right now. In addition what is going on is nothing new in terms of feminism's" relationship" to it's history and it's present.

Mary Daly an influential scholar was demonized and lionized in equal measure. Much of why she is lionized and there is a rush to canonize her is sadly not her influence on our own lives adn stories but how much attention she got from mainstream media academia and press. She terrified men so that's what makes her important.

Mary Daly has this status so many people feel comfortable not knowing her work after the time period when she does this so they miss the implications of the other work and actions. They miss the threads that make the story full wove. That a study of the goddess and religion that does not include POC and missappropriates region and time period while ignoring others misses huge chunks of theology that talks about trans religious figures mutability of gender and WOC as anything but misery cases. It misses the hatred ( and I don't care if you call someone an abomination that is hate ) and then compartmentalizes it as no big deal.

Mary Daly is white and cis so even when others ( in one conversation with a mentor she pointed out where are the campaigns to hold up Cheryl Clarke and Merle Woo and I had to be ashamed that I didn't know Merle Woo was fighting for tenure at a concurrent period and all I knew of her was her letter in Bridge called my back) point out her flaws it is often shunted into teh SHE DID THIS SHE TRIED category.

Mary Daly used language and words and intent that shook women that moved many to take up power and direction in fashion no other woman has matched .

That call to power included ways of using that power that was terrifying and LIFE THREATENING to other women.

None of this is new. NONE of it is okay to leave out. Mary Daly should be remembered for her pioneering , in all it entails . The blazing of new trails , the new ideas, the doing of those things across the backs of others and based on ignoring others agency and history as she saw fit.

She is a fitting saint for feminism. In the middle of the lions den , creating small miracles, both of creation and destruction, imbued with divine purpose and bathed in blood and complexity.

For me while history making and an informer of my thinking she is also terrifying and a cautionary tale of trans hate, privilege blindness , and selective critique. Of what happens when brashness and agitation are the focus than collaborative movement thinking, whose writing makes me thank god she existed and thank god she never got the things she asked for.

But mostly she is a cautionary tale , of why a movement must reconnect with its history and focus on it's future with a clear eyed assessment of what that will hold.

and in the end I wish her an after life and a remembrance that answers to ALL of her facets in all the vigor she proclaimed them

Princess and The Frog

I believe in magic, I believe in magic from Elle’s voice, listening to LSU fans , speaking french with certain tourists, the people who meet me in my job and invite me to their homes

I am slightly afraig to go to Louisiana in so much as I’m not sue I’d come back.

I been promising the write up for a while and it’s getting away form me as I am occupied with other things .

I love Jazz.

I love little black girls in America, and big ones and I know ho w much we waited for this movie

Princess and the Frog wasn’t terrible.

It just wasn’t magical , and it wasn’t magical in the way that most people believe that a certain kind of life is never magical.

In my mind the critiques and the movie intertwine so I warn you to be kind as I may go tangential.

I can’t feel sadness too much from women who were angry that the “ first black princess” didn’t get the proper fairy treatment.

I wish it was just a problem of stereotyping. PRoblems of stereotyping are easy to fix, tell the simple bastids doing it to stop and keep it moving.

The main problem of this movie was not stereotyping but lack of magic.

Whoever put this together didn’t in my opinion see enough magic in story and perplexingly enough in the City of New Orleans.

Remembering Disney of my childhood of the grand shots of the underwater, the desert sands, provincial France and the African Serengeti, New Orleans was writ comparatively small and tight.

For a place that figures in many people’s dreams and fantasies , in teh piousness, in their debauchery . of thinking of the voice of Elle and now inexorably in our national consciousness. To see it experienced as something to be passed through and not awes at and gaped and a place where yes MAGIC WILL HAPPEN HERE was hollow.

Many sisters have complained that Tianna had a small dream, or no kingdom or wanting to be a restaraunter was a “ lowly” pursuit.

I would like to inform their bougie asses to sit down ( but only for a lil bit)

In a place such as Louisiana , with it’s influence with it’s culture being a good cook isn’t a small aspiration. Having a city renowned restaurant isn’t a necessarily small dream.

It was EXPRESSED in a smallish way. Disney Princesses are always problematic and Tianna is no different, but so much of the critique of her feels to me ( and I put my poor bootstrapping issues upfront where you can see em) was that she wasn’t the right class.

For a girl who seemed to study french cuisine, and ingredients and have such a dedicated work ethic what pissed me off was that even though inspired by her father and her community , there was no stamp of TIANNA on her dreams.

Damn whether or not the dream is big enough . It seemed to not be in anyway made HER OWN.

We see her work , we see her sweat but outside of wanting to please her daddy , where is her desire and vim and passion for this?

Most of that is moot as she spends most of it a frog. Her arch enemy doesn’t know she’s alive and her “prince”

The music was so disappointing

RANDY NEWMAN ( was Dr. John busy?!!?!) Terence Blanchard played the horn why not give him the score? No large number in orleans ( dancing swap creatures don’t count)

Inexorably longwinded Sydette post short.

I wanted Magic , attention to detail and care.

I wanted to see what would happen if the place that taught me about magic in all it’s flaws looked at the story of America and one of America’s hearts and saw magic, and majesty and triumph.

I wanted to see a movie where the female protagonist having a skill was celebrated or understood or cherished , not her dream not her succumbing to wishing but her skill, the kindness , the joy she shared , the talent in the alchemy of cooking.

I had tingles at the thought of amazing art design and beautiful New Orleans music , of seeing bands and the Krewes of MARDI GRAS, of the french , where Marie Laveau tread and story ville swang could be something magical and fully animated on screen

Because straight up it is.
I wanted that crazy acadian lightening bug ( who I love and Disney needs to give me a plush toy that lights up it’s BUTT) that fell in love with the north star have a song.

I wanted the art to be more like the Jazz interval.

I wanted to feel something besides a grab at my skin color in hopes of a grab at my wallet by playing on the fact that Disney has always left girls like me out( except for Jasmine and we took her cause she actually had booty and whyof teh overly sexualized Arab girl as the only half nekkid human princess , cause even Ariel puts a dress on)

Because people I know from Louisiana are magical, little black girls are wonderous, and if you have EVER in your life had good gumbo , or heard a black woman from Louisiana laugh , or musician talk about her song there or a coworker talk about his love of LSU there is magic in the love there.

Disney didn’t see it and that is much more sad than how many $$ a fake prince has in a fake bank account.