February 18, 2017 By Keisha McKenzie

Lorde and Morrison on identity and action

Audre Lorde and Toni Morrison were born on the same birthdate, February 18: Morrison in 1931 and Lorde in 1934.

Thanks to the good folks at Many Voices, I’ve been listening to Audre Lorde speaking to students at UCLA. The date of the lecture is unclear, but the video uploader places the session in the early 1990s.

She begins by inviting the audience to inquire of themselves, “Who am I and how do I use who I am in the service of what I believe?”

Then Lorde reads from her stories of her childhood and early adult in the East Village, New York City, learning to recognize her identity as Black, woman, and lesbian, and how each of these components of what made her her also differentiated her life experiences from those of the people around her.

The talk is about an hour long and includes an extended Q&A session with UCLA’s students on seeking and building community and being courageous.

Some of the highlights:

“We recognized oppression as oppression no matter where it came from. It is not the function of a woman—any woman—to love or to accept the psyche of her oppressor, even when that psyche is embodied in another woman.”
“As we identify who we are, we begin the journey to use that power. It is what empowerment is all about. Power that is not used is dangerous because power is never quiescent; it’s never neutral. If I do not use my power, however relative it is; if I do not find out what it is and learn how to use it, someone else is using it. The power you do not use, is being used against us.”
“We get strong by doing the thing we need to be strong for. So there’s always that little risk. And yes, you’re afraid. We’ll always be afraid. If we wait until we’re not afraid to move, not afraid to act, [then] we’ll be sending little messages on the Ouija board… I started out like we all started out: like a coward.”
“You must have a group where you feel articulated and accepted. And if it doesn’t exist, you have a responsibility to create it.”
“Isolation is corrosive and it is dangerous. It is anti-revolutionary, too, which is why so many of us exist in isolation. Get together. If there are two of us doing something, maybe next week, there’ll be four. You need to know you are not alone. And you have a responsibility to make whoever you identify with know that they are not alone either.”

I wonder how Toni Morrison would respond to Lorde’s concept of collective courage: Morrison draws strength from a more solitary generative process.

She describes writing as an act of creation that connects her with the external world and gives her the tools to interpret the world and reinvent it. Morrison has said that the artist and writer have the power to challenge tyrannies and that they do that work by persistently creating and writing.

“There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear,” she wrote.

I first quoted that statement in March 2015. Six years beforehand that, Morrison explained to UC-Davis’ Pam Houston how writing allows her to experience the good news that we can continue to grow: wherever we start in our understanding of ourselves or our sense of connection to the wider world isn’t the end of our story. We can, as Lorde said, grow more courageous through disciplined action. We can perceive others more clearly as we attend to the world around us.

Toni: I feel more friendly when I am writing, nicer to people, much more generous, also wiser. I am full of a kind of tenderness toward people and all they have to hide, all they have to construct. Not pity, not sympathy, just tenderness. Knowing that the job of being a human is so hard, and it is the only job there is left—though we keep on pretending otherwise. If I am in that good place and I run into someone I dislike, I feel more human and they seem more human…

There are all sorts of ways people try to stay connected, try not to live in hate. Religion may be one of them, but for me the central thing is the writing. The art itself. Putting my intelligence and my humanity to the best possible use, and I get better because I am doing it. The writing teaches me that I can’t just reach some little plateau and say that’s it, this is the place. It is always a search.

Pam: And that is the good news.

Toni: That is the good news.”

Read the rest.

December 16, 2016 By Keisha McKenzie

Tracing a theme over time

I’ve been eagerly anticipating Laura Mvula’s second album, The Dreaming Room, since her debut was published in 2013. Sing to the Moon is a sumptuous blend of clear vocals and soaring orchestral music. Three years later I’ve still not heard anything like it.

“Green Garden” is a solid introduction to Mvula’s style: instantly nostalgic, stylish, and smooth. Through the lyrics of the song and her own body language, Mvula declares the reality she wants to live in: “I’ll fly / with the wings of a butterfly / High as the treetops, then down again.”

The video for “Green Garden” invokes a healing scene of near-worship in Toni Morison’s Beloved:

In this here place, we flesh; flesh that weeps, laughs; flesh that dances on bare feet in grass. Love it. Love it hard. Yonder they do not love your flesh. They despise it… This is flesh I’m talking about here. Flesh that needs to be loved. Feet that need to rest and to dance; backs that need support; shoulders that need arms, strong arms I’m telling you.” —Baby Suggs, Beloved

And then comes Round 2 from Mvula: “Overcome.” The vocals and the strings there are back!

Mvula traces a few recurring bars across these two albums. The notes are modified enough to feel new and continuous enough to stay familiar.

Change-workers have a longstanding debate about being “liberal” and interested in progressing toward good or “conservative” and interested in conserving what’s good. Through these two songs, Mvula does both, encouraging affirmation and strength, reveling in design and dance, and loving this body, just as Baby Suggs asked us to.

Take your broken wings and fly.” —Laura Mvula

August 10, 2014 By Keisha McKenzie

Morrison and Vaid-Menon

Two very different and very similar speakers, teachers, and change-makers: author Toni Morrison delivering her 1993 Nobel Lecture on December 7, 1993, and Dark Matter’s Alok Vaid-Menon, breaking down “success” and complicity at TEDxMiddlebury, twenty Decembers later.

Toni Morrison on Violence and Story-telling

Oppressive language does more than represent violence—it is violence; does more than represent the limits of knowledge—it limits knowledge. Whether it is obscuring state language or the faux language of mindless media; whether it is the proud but calcified language of the academy or the commodity-driven language of science; whether it is the malign language of law without ethics or language designed for the estrangement of minorities, hiding its racist plunder in its literary cheek, it must be rejected, altered, and exposed…

Art (c) Keturah Ariel

‘You are an adult. The old one, the wise one. Stop thinking about saving your face. Think of our lives and tell us your particularized world. Make up a story. Narrative is radical, creating us at the very moment it is being created. We will not blame you if your reach exceeds your grasp; if love so ignites your words they go down in flames and nothing is left but their scald. Or if, with the reticence of a surgeon’s hands, your words suture only the places where blood might flow.

We know you can never do it properly—once and for all. Passion is never enough; neither is skill. But try. For our sake and yours forget your name in the street; tell us what the world has been to you in the dark places and in the light. Don’t tell us what to believe, what to fear. Show us belief’s wide skirt and the stitch that unravels fear’s caul.’ —Toni Morrison

Listen to the rest of Morrison’s Nobel Lecture, given December 7, 1993. (Or read it.)

Alok Vaid-Menon on the Power of Failing

“Who is invited to speak about a movement, and who must die for it? I was so concerned with being a successful researcher that I glossed over the parts of the work that were the most important, the hard and invisible parts of building trust, empathy, and solidarity.” —Alok Vaid-Menon

July 7, 2014 By Keisha McKenzie

Transcript: Toni Morrison at Portland State, 1975

Educating the conqueror is not our business. —Toni Morrison

Last week some of us heard for the first time a presentation that Prof. Toni Morrison made in May 1975 during a public lecture series on the theme of the American Dream.

“A Humanist View” begins by surveying technically objective shipping records. Comparing the records’ descriptions of rice, tar, turpentine, and humans, Morrison highlights the inhumanity of American slavery, the studied ignorance and skew of contemporary social sciences, and opportunities for Black artists to write and speak to their own community rather than write as educators for curious White audiences.

This weekend I sat down to listen to the 2-hour audio recording and transcribe Morrison’s presentation and responses during the Q&A. She discusses aspects of historical and contemporary racism, the economic roots of the racism tree, and uses racial epithets while describing how specific populations buy their way out of limiting social positions—literally using their creativity to become indispensable to local markets.

Download the transcript in Rich Text Format or in PDF.

Since Portland State’s Soundcloud recording remains free, please don’t sell/resell this transcript or access to it. And to honor Morrison’s argument and intellectual legacy, please do use this content to fuel your own research, self-education, and art.

Please send any transcription corrections via my contact form. I’ll update the links above with the latest versions.

[Latest transcripts: 7/7/2014]

October 1, 2013 By Keisha McKenzie

Inspired Possibility: Opening the Gift of the Queer Soul

Part of the 2013 Queer Theology Synchroblog | Thanks, @shannontlkearns, for the invite.

The earth was without form and void
and darkness was on the face of the deep.
And the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. – Genesis 1:2

Imagine with me the void before “Let there be light”—the empty space before the components of creation started to self-assemble. In the formlessness of the earth, there’s nothing to see, and nothing to see by: no light or substance but water, Spirit, and movement. The water ripples while the Spirit hovers overhead, and all else is still. This second verse of Genesis shows us a planet-sized zero, and in the midst of this zero, God is. Before land, life, or any recognizable form has emerged, the Spirit of God moves. All that exists begins in this formless place, and with God present, anything is possible.

Inspired Possibility

Perhaps because so many verses come after Genesis 1:2 and only one comes before it, we often struggle to understand what “anything is possible” actually means. We enter this life and find pre-mapped worlds of experience, interpretation, and meaning already here. If anything in the scriptures is foreign to us, it’s the formless void described in this text. We don’t know what to do with formlessness; it’s a shifting thing to us, and so we struggle to tame it by assigning it a name: queer.

The Hebrew word translated “spirit” in Genesis 1:2, ruach, is a word that can also mean “wind,” or “breath.” When ruach appears in the Bible, it almost always signals God’s presence. God breathes, and divine breath brings life. In John 3, Jesus says, “The wind blows where it wishes, and you hear the sound of it, but cannot tell where it comes from and where it goes.” We can see what wind and Spirit produce, but we can’t trace their source or project their next motion. We don’t know what the blowing wind or moving Spirit might become, but we can experience their presence with us in this moment. An experience of presence: that was the experience and gift of the beginning, when the infinite possibility of God appeared without form and void.

“And so is everyone that is born of the Spirit,” says John (John 3:8). We are formed in God’s image, and unfolded by the Spirit of God. The Spirit that once moved over the waters now moves through us, and like the once-formless earth, we are fluid in the hands of God. As the void held space for God’s designs, so we express all the variation God can imagine. As the Spirit moves through us, we receive in our bodies new possibilities for the world.

Breathing through Uncertainty

But just as the primeval void came with darkness, new potentials come with uncertainty. Formless spaces are both liberating and paralyzing: it’s when we gain the freedom to create absolutely anything that we can be tempted to mimic the commonplace, the average, the usual. Because of our bias toward the already created, it’s easy to fear the darkness that covers the deep and makes the familiar strange.

Yet that darkness also teaches us: the possible doesn’t have to use precedent as its foundation. “Tradition” is not reified in the darkness or in the void of potential. We can choose to cite the already-done, to incorporate it into new life-yielding patterns and rites, but tradition stands with and never over us. Convention stands in the same relationship to the void and the pre-manifest space of potential as any other configuration of reality. The so-called normative, dominant, and customary are not the heart of all things; there is only one Heart, and we are Its very good creation.

The moving Spirit of Genesis 1:2 is the Breath of God that connects the creature to the Creator, and this connection cannot be broken by any made thing (Romans 8). We’re entangled with God, moved by the ever-present limitlessness of Spirit-Wisdom, pulsing with Her potential for innovation and life. Connected to our Creator by our in-breath (inspiration) and out-breath (expression), we’re inherently part of something more deeply coherent than atomized identity, institutional affiliation, or conditional belonging. As God inspires matter, as energy moves through what is, earth’s formless void becomes a teeming planet. We can breathe deeply and in trust, being inspired through the Spirit, and opening to what could just as easily be and not only what is. ¹

Generating as well as Restoring

So queer creation may begin with reshaping, recasting, and recreating what’s already here. In To Heal A Fractured World: The Ethics of Responsibility, R. Jonathan Sacks writes that we all have a role in reshaping this world: “We are here to make a difference,” he says, “to mend the fractures of the world, a day at a time, an act at a time, for as long as it takes to make it a place of justice and compassion where the lonely are not alone, the poor not without help, where the cry of the vulnerable is heeded and those who are wronged are heard.” Yes, this is part of our work; it’s a restorative, “repairing the breach” role, and as long as we’re queer in a world that resists and oppresses the different, we’ll have that role to play.

But queerness is more than merely restoring what is: we can also sense and draw out from the void possibilities that rigid and exclusive structures didn’t allow to emerge in the first place. Our generative work requires that we add to the world fresh wisdom and new structures, not merely revisions, hacks, or disruptions. Just as our Creator drew us out of nothing, we too have the capacity to create powerful newness through our lives, in our relationships, religious and spiritual communities, and social organizations.

When I shared Genesis 1:2 with a group of LGBTI and queer Seventh-day Adventists three years ago, I didn’t yet have the words for what I sensed in the text or in the slow development of my life: our very existence as queer people invites us onto a different pathway for imagination, vision, and creation than those opened to us by a hyper-structured hetero- and cis-sexist society. Not only do we see this reality differently because of who we are and how we experience life, but it’s also our spiritual responsibility to share our vision from the ground on which we stand instead of rejecting our ground and privileging others’. When we fail to express out of who we are, whether because of fear, repression, or disbelief in our own value, our band of creative potential is wholly lost to the manifest world.

To express this capacity in a coherent way, we’ll have to develop and practice a new gaze.

Creating with a Different Gaze

Earlier this year, Pulitzer and Nobel Prize-winning novelist Toni Morrison spoke to the Cornell University community about her literary legacy and her play Desdemona. She explained to the audience why the character Iago didn’t survive her editorial cut as she re-envisioned Othello through Desdemona’s eyes, what it means to excise “the white gaze” from one’s work, and how doing so opened up creative space for her. Listen to what she said (38:58-47:12).

[This is what] has been happening more and more and more in my books, actually all of them, and that is to take away what I call ‘the white gaze.’ Whose eye, whose language is controlling this? Well, in Othello, it’s Iago…

[In the traditional African-American novel] the oppressor is the white man, or the white idea, or the captain, or the plantation; that’s who they were confronting. [Ralph] Ellison, [James] Baldwin, Richard Wright—you understood they were responding to, defending themselves, or aggressively attacking that idea of the white oppressor.

And I thought: I can’t do that. What is the world like if [the oppressor’s] not there? The freedom, the open world that appears… it’s stunning. And I notice most African-American women writers did the same thing. Toni Cade Bambara, not always Alice Walker but many times, Maya Angelou, those writers, and the poets…

There was this free space opened up by refusing to respond every minute to the gaze, somebody else’s gaze. So that flavored a great deal what I was writing. But you’ll understand about Iago now, why I had to get rid of him.—Toni Morrison

Refusing to respond every minute to the gaze, someone else’s gaze. Refusing to root our creative acts in the limitations others project onto us or the frameworks of meaning and value they map onto the world. Refusing to allow our Iagos to dominate our attention or conversation. Using our creative energy not to battle or defend, but to build up and out instead from the beautiful we see in ourselves. Having shifted our gaze, we center ourselves and our visions for this world on what we see from our perspective and the connectedness we experience with our Source and the Source of all creation. If, according to community catechisms and statements of belief, we’re not enough as we are, creating anew must become enough for us.

What’s the world like if the oppressor’s not there? What will we see when our gaze is authentic, when we’re grounded and clear? What will we make with our talk-of-God and love-of-others? How will we change? What will we teach?

May we inquire of ourselves, and answer in our creating.

Let there be light… and may it be queer.

^{1. I owe this formulation to the man I call My Friend’s Dad: an incredibly wise grandfather and sense-maker who sees beyond the manifest and inspires me to do the same. ↩}

toni morrison