My job becomes how to rip that veil drawn over ‘proceedings too terrible to relate.’ The exercise is also critical for any person who is black, or who belongs to any marginalized category, for, historically, we were seldom invited to participate in the discourse even when we were its topic. Moving that veil aside requires, therefore, certain things. First of all, I must trust my own recollections. I must also depend on the recollections of others. Thus memory weighs heavily in what I write, in how I begin, and in what I find to be significant.

 -Toni Morrison, The Site of Memory

This series offered space and time for participants to explore writing and art-making in a post-apocalyptic reality. In the process of writing, feedback, and revision, our intention was to chart the landscapes of Black private and public worlds. What are the physical and liminal spaces that matter to us, and what memories and significance do we ascribe to them and why? Over the course of three sessions, discussions around these questions and the generation of new pieces of prose poetry culminated in the creation of mother mercy’s first literary collection. We hoped to emerge from the series a little closer to being diligent custodians of collective memory, both ours and those of our forebears who make us possible, handling tender memories with curiosity and compassion, as well as emerging feeling more free in our minds, bodies, and spirits. The workshops were facilitated by JME and Dzizdor, African folk artist, author, and community builder.

instructors

dzidzor

Dzidzor (Jee-Jaw) is a Ghanian- American folklore performing artist, author, and curator. Dzidzor’s style of call and response has combined traditional storytelling in Afro-folklore and Poetry Slam through a sonic experience. Dzidzor is moved by the responsibility to alarm the power/abundance in the midst of bodies while creating a practice of care and freedom through creativity. Dzidzor is the founder of Black Cotton Club and partners with Grubstreet, ICA Boston, and Boston Public Schools to teach creative empowerment workshops in Boston. Dzidzor released her debut EP entitled “bush woman” (a 15-minute meditation project) on April 10th, 2020.

jme

As founder of mother mercy, JME is guided by a vision for liberation and combines dedicated art practice with academic, community, and deep self-study. JME’s own practice crosses the worlds of visual and literary art; for her, both are a community’s necessary medium. Political Science, Black Studies, and Urban Affairs prepared JME for a 10- year career in the nonprofit world before teaching at Emerson College and receiving her MFA in creative writing. She was also a Callaloo Fellow. Her latest work can be found at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in conversation with Titian: Women, Myth & Power.

JUST TELL ME THE TIME AND THE PLACE:

BLACK DIASPORIC ART AND THE POWER OF MEMORY AND MAPPING

So Black people - we the first people who had thought, right? We was the first ones to say, ‘Where the fuck am I, and how do you get to Detroit?

-Richard Pryor

This panel discussion took place virtually in September 2021 and featured Letta Neely, Porsha Olayiwola, and moderator Dr. Jakeya (Courage) Caruthers. The discussion laid the groundwork for the writing workshops, opening the way to think in community as we wrote and revised together. Our intention with this panel was to foster an intergenerational dialogue, joining the work of scholars, organizers, and artists to think through the ways Black diasporic art refuses forgetting and maps liberatory landscapes. Black place and Black time form the heart of several Black existential and spiritual questions. Where do we go? Where are we (to be/exist)? Do we remember how to get there/to that place where we (can) be? These questions have always had critical urgency, but that urgency grows in the face of cataclysmic rumblings.

moderator

Dr. Jakeya (courage) caruthers

Newly appointed Assistant Professor of African Studies and English at Drexel University, Dr. Caruthers has been working on a manuscript that engages what she terms the “humor of unusual accommodation.” This work queries the small, incisive, and humorous ways that Black people manage and trouble racial crisis through the unruly affect of curiosity, socio-spatial anteriority, and a political logic informed by what Toni Morrison calls, “the legitimacy of forces other than good ones.” 

panelists

letta neely

a mapping of the terrain—earthling ((Black dyke: creative: writer: artist: activist: womanist:  mama/daddy: wildcrafter: witch)) lover, connector, draptomaniac, nerd n instigator.

some details--in addition to Juba and Here, letta is the author of the chapbooks When We Were Mud and gawd and alluh huh sistuhs.  

 her plays: “Hamartia Blues", "Last Rites", and “Shackles & Sugar”  have been produced in Boston, Philly, and Los Angeles. 

 she is a co-artistic director for Fort Point Theatre Channel and an associate director of Apprentice Learning.  she is also an actor and director. 

 the aerial view--the divine estuary where struggle and liberation meet/ is a cauldron/ is ancestral and future/ is where she bathes 

what’s brewing right now--1) Traces/ Remain:Seed to Harvest project with Deen Rawlins.  and 2) Her newest book Geographies of Power will be available in Spring 2022.  and 3) she is co-creating inPublic with a group of other magic beings brought together by DS4SI. and 4) anybody wanna take a walk sometime?

porsha olayiwola

Black, poet, queer-dyke, hip-hop feminist, womanist: Porsha is a native of Chicago who now resides in Boston. Olayiwola is a writer, performer, educator, and curator who uses afro-futurism and surrealism to examine historical and current issues in the Black, woman, and queer diasporas. She is an Individual World Poetry Slam Champion and the founder of the Roxbury Poetry Festival. Olayiwola is Brown University's 2019 Heimark Artist-in-Residence and a poet laureate fellow with the Academy of American Poets. She is an MFA Candidate at Emerson College, The author of i shimmer sometimes, too published by Button Poetry, and is also the current poet laureate for the city of Boston. Her work can be found published with TriQuarterly Magazine, The Boston Globe, Essence Magazine, Redivider, The Academy of American Poets, Wildness Press, The Museum of Fine Arts, and elsewhere.

writer-in-residence reflection: Stealing Back Time, Memory, Self

Since my first encounter with the notion in the first line of Dionne Brand’s novel In Another Place, Not Here, “thiefing sugar” became shorthand for all kinds of mundane acts of defiance or refusal that in my mind were my only way of asserting my wills and desires over a daily life largely under the control of whoever signed my paychecks. This sweet thievery looked like taking the long way back from a lunch break, playing with the pronouns in love poems, wandering the streets of New Orleans on the company’s conference dime, and other more intangible flights of imaginative fancy that reserved my best selves only for those who saw beyond my compliance and capacity to labor. Thiefing sugar is among other tactics an acknowledgment that the continued existence of this current world does is not compatible with the safety, pleasure, and lives of those of us who are black, femme, queer, disabled, poor, and otherwise experiencing the convergences of all kinds of deathly matrices of domination. Beyond naming these social realities, it asserts our insistence on pursuing and stealing everyday beauty even as we labor for our material needs and survival. We withhold access to our imaginations, and we withhold our energy and the works of our hands, as workers across contexts are currently demonstrating by going on strike  for much more than the bare minimum requirements for sweeter living. 

Thiefing sugar is black femme craft, like glamouring, another form of refusal that has gripped much of my thinking and writing since I first heard Arthur Jafa describe it as a way that Black people deflect against violent forces acting against us. My interpretation and extension of Jafa’s idea moves further than the more obvious or conventional sense of aesthetic beauty and too much-ness. It is the audacious act of creating a life led by one’s own desires out of the ruin that is presumed to be both our birthright and deathbed-mate. Glamouring in my sense involves a deep interest in and commitment to one’s own pleasure and its fulfillment, a way of life reminiscent of Toni Morrison’s fearsome and deliciously brazen Sula, perhaps without the too dear price Sula had to pay for being the way she was, and the cruelty and isolation her kind of freedom almost necessitated because it threatened and ultimately destroyed her most important relationship, that with her best girlfriend Nel. Glamouring is also a practice of self-protection, a way to render parts of the self opaque or inaccessible to evade objectification and surveillance. 

Another grounding principle in my wondering and writing is an idea I describe as the back fem[me]/feminist sublime, a way of looking that makes room for the experience and description of both beauty and abjection. The black femme[me]/feminist sublime is a queer Black woman gaze turned on colonized landscapes and their ability to display near-idyllic beauty as well as the violence this beauty can hold and conceal. It is a framework for understanding the necessary interplay of pain and pleasure. Our black femme way of knowing and looking far surpasses and transcends “duality,” or “juxtaposition” because we are too vast. Our understanding of power and dispossession is in an open space in the dimensions beyond the second and third to which the uninitiated have access. 

The initial intention for the mother mercy writing series was to use glamouring and the black femme sublime as the grounding for discussions and the creation of new work in the writing workshop, but it became clear that I needed more time to read and write around these ideas in order for them to be fruitful for the writers we were inviting into the workshop. Badia Ahad-Legardy’s Afro-Nostalgia: Feeling Good in Contemporary Black Culture presented exciting arguments around nostalgia as another practice of refusal, a way for Black people to access repair and retribution through memory, which has been hostile and burial ground for black people when presented through the cracked lens of whiteness. 

In addition to reading Ahad-Legardy’s work, JME and I had several conversations about mapping the cities of Accra and Boston across our different personal and generational perspectives and experiences. Our wanderings were sparked in part by Sonia E. Barrett’s art piece Dreading the Map. Installed in the Map Room of the Royal Geographical Society in London, Barret collaborated with other Black women to braid shredded strips of colonial maps, both an act of refusal against colonial violence  and a demonstration of the Afro-diasporic community care practice  of braiding. This work presented exciting possibilities about how we could co-create and curate a project that thought about diaspora and our fraught geographies with the complexity and care we owe to the work and to our selves.

We have been collectively grieving and seeking sweetness before today, but the acute grief and uncertainty of health and climate crises made the idea of thinking through memory and mapping with other writers and artists feel like a worthwhile and urgent matter. What does it mean to care for our selves, for our collective memory, for the land, in the face of heightened threats to all these?

for study & dreaming

Like our dreams, our study and reflections are vast and plenty. It is our pleasure to invite you into this space of curiosity and [re]memory; here, we are precious with each other and with the memories we withhold for fear of the pain threatening to break the dam that is our nostalgia, our humor, our keepsakes, our favorite parks, our cemeteries. Here, we exchange scraps of the atlas and spoken directions—turn right at the house with the yellow shutters and keep going til you no longer feel the urge to run—and we recognize that familiar landscapes do not mean that we are lost nor are we traveling in circles in eternal futility; rather, they are imprints of our footsteps not yet formed, an indication that we have been, are, and will be.  

Ahad-Legardy, Badia. Afro-Nostalgia: Feeling Good in Contemporary Black Culture. University of Illinois Press, 2021.

Aidoo, Ama Ata. Our Sister Killjoy. Longman, 1994. 

Akyeampong, Emmanuel Kwaku. Between the Sea and the Lagoon: An Eco-social History of the Anlo of Southeastern Ghana, c.1850 to Recent Time. James Currey, 2002. 

Brand, Dionne. A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging. Vintage Canada, 2002.

Christian, Barbara. “ ‘Somebody Forgot to Tell Somebody Something’: African-American Women’s Historical Fiction.” Wild Women in the Whirlwind: Afra-American Culture and the Contemporary Literary Renaissance. Rutgers University Press, 1989.

Dreading the Map, YouTube, uploaded by CARICUK, 21 May 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wnfd4HRMn3M. 

Greene, Sandra. Sacred Sites and the Colonial Encounter: A History of Meaning and Memory in Ghana. Indiana University Press, 2002. 

Hartman, Saidiya. Lose Your Mother. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008.

Hartman, Saidiya. “Venus in Two Acts.” Small Axe, vol. 12, no. 2, 2008, pp. 1-14.

Hartman, Saidiya. Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval. W.W. Norton & Company, 2019

King, Tiffany Lethabo. Black Shoals: Offshore Formations of Black and Native Studies. Duke University Press, 2019.

Morrison, Toni. “The Site of Memory.” Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir. ed. William Zinsser. Houghton Mifflin Company, 1987. pp. 103-123.

thinking and feeling through process and ritual: an artist talk

This presentation took place in November 2021 and provided perspective on crafting a life of one’s own design as an artist, stealing away time for dreaming, sweetness, and creation from other responsibilities and concerns around material survival, or "thiefing sugar" as Dionne Brand writes. mother mercy writer-in-residence Zoë Gadegbeku shared the ethical, intellectual, and aesthetic considerations that ground her work, including what she calls the black fem[me]/feminist sublime, a Black queer gaze and framework that accounts for beauty and violence in landscape and experience. The talk also explored the role of ritual in writing across genres and the tangible processes that make creative work possible.