Repetition Is Sacred

Feminist Studies 40, no. 1. © 2014 by Alexis Pauline Gumbs 207 Alexis Pauline Gumbs Repetition Is Sacred: School of Our Lorde, Mobile Homecoming, and Legacy in Flight Again. We are celebrating Audre Lorde’s birth, contributions, and legacy again. We are reading her poems again and sharing them with new generations. We are creating churches designed around the Lordean practice of speaking the truth that shakes us. We affirm that the energy we name and remember as “Audre Lorde” is not a coincidence in time, or an accidental incident, but a bright insight into a pattern of loving, living, growing, and burning up that can inform structures and centuries. We are making that space where the energy we call keeping it real, transformation , Audre Lorde, all of us, survival, becomes more possible. This tribute to Audre Lorde and invitation into some of the work being done in her legacy takes the form of a Lorde Concordance Oracle, which is a site-specific ritual practice that I have been engaging in in multiple physical and discursive spaces since the twentieth anniversary of Audre Lorde’s transcendence to ancestor realness. The oracle is awakened by my repetitive reading of a text by Audre Lorde (in this case her 1974 poem “To Marie, in Flight”) and by my distillation of alphabetized sub-poems. In community, individuals would operationalize the oracle by having a Lordean moment (that is, saying something out loud that shakes them) and associating it with a letter of the alphabet (e.g., I want my more meaningful movement with my mother. What is the poem for the letter M?). We would then engage in a conversation sparked by their question, request, or confession and the distilled poem. 7 Celebrating Audre Lorde’s Legacy 8 208 Alexis Pauline Gumbs In this case I will activate the oracle in order to clarify what is most urgent to share about the linked five-year herstories that comprise the Audre Lorde-inspired projects School of Our Lorde (summerofourlorde. wordpress.com) and Mobile Homecoming (mobilehomecoming.org). h h h a all j I sat among Audre Lorde’s papers thinking about all the people who needed her example, her details, her hard days, her drafts and who would never sit between 9 and 5 in the Spelman College Archives. # I sat in the Lesbian Herstory Archives, the Sallie Bingham Archive, the National Archives of Canada, the Schlesinger Archive, the Emory Manuscript and Rare Book Library, Special Collections at Hunter, the Beineke, the Bancroft, thinking about the queer Black folks out there who nobody collected, checked for, documented, wrote down. but body blood body blood breath beating between j But between my body my beating blood and my bruised brain I knew that people who don’t have the time and privilege to visit archives sometimes make time to go to potlucks. The School of Our Lorde started with three potlucks in one summer on three of Key: j tracks the School of Our Lorde; # tracks the Mobile Homecoming Project Alexis Pauline Gumbs 209 Lorde’s essays in partnership with three community organizations in Durham. # But between our breathing bodies our beating blood our blossoming boo-thang bliss, filmmaker heartthrob Julia/Sangodare Wallace and I decided that we could find the unarchivable Black queer elders who made us possible wherever they were. And that we needed to find them now while their blood was breathing their bodies beating. We wanted to hold them and heal ourselves from the beatings they took. continuity cabin captures j Activists, artists, elementary school teachers, postal workers, students, cashiers, came together and went deep on Audre Lorde’s essays like they could save our lives, like they could transform our community. No one wanted the summer to end. We continue. The potlucks became monthly and endless. The Eternal Summer of the Black Feminist Mind was born. # Julia/Sangodare and I traveled in a 1988 Winnebago up and down and across the country. In the small and sometimes overheating space of our awe we mapped continuity and difference, we stacked the cabin of the RV with lost pamphlets and books without distributors, we bought more and more hard drives to keep the

Art · Art history · Homecoming · Literature · Poetry · Reading (process) · Repetition (rhetorical device) · Contemporary Literature and Criticism · Gender, Feminism, and Media · History · Philosophy · Short Stories in Global Literature

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