Status Updates From Survival Is a Promise: The ...

“When we speak, we are afraid our words will not be heard or welcomed, but when we are silent, we are still afraid. So it is better to speak.”

Diaspora specifically means “the scattering of seeds/spores on the wind”

“The guardians of the border, the gatekeepers. The gender outlaws. The black people most vulnerable to the violence of a deadly and homophobic gender binary.”

“Some words are open, like a diamond on glass windows, singing out within the crash of passing sun.” Audre Lorde, coal

“Of course a honey bee can fly, it’s easy. All she has to do is shake the air around her into a million, tiny hurricanes.”

“Sometimes, existence is empowerment.”

Audre and June Jordan’s friendship ended bc June felt unsupported by Audre during the public feuds with Rich over Palestine. Adrienne Rich and Jordan later reconciled and wrote letters “agreeing to fight about things they believe in rather than never talk again” and Rich acted as an intermediary between Lorde and Jordan, trying to reconnect them + sharing details about their lives. They never reconnected

“Typewriters travelled wherever colonialism travelled. In countries colonized by Britain, like Kenya and India, typewriters arrived with colonial offices. Eventually, those typewriters, replaced by updated models, made their way into communities under colonial control.”

We don’t have complete thoughts from Audre about Zionism. Only a cryptic journal entry where she said: “where does that leave A [Rich] plus me? Where does that leave June plus me?”
Her 1989 commencement address at Oberlin college asked grads to be critical of US support of Palestinian occupation.

June Jordan was blacklisted by the NY times for her anti-Zionism

“To Adrienne, I make this public reply: your evident definition of feminism leaves you indistinguishable from the white men threatening the planet with extinction. I refuse to assume responsibility for your actions and your inertia. I do not accept you as my people.” - June Jordan to Adrienne Rich, following Adrienne’s insistence on being a Zionist.

Adrienne Rich was Jewish, part of feminist Jewish groups that worked on sexism in the Jewish population + antisemitism in the greater American populace, and signed off on a letter stating that “all critique or rejection of Zionism is anti-semitism.” Yikes

Polaroid (the camera company) played an integral role during South Africa’s apartheid by aiding (?) as the key company used to create passbooks for the govt. to use to track ppl

HP in Israeli apartheid - runs the databases that track Palestinian citizens’ movements

“She argued that lesbian as a literary critical reading practice was not about whether and if literary characters or authors had sex with women, but was rather about a world view that fundamentally challenged patriarchal relations.” - Barbara smith and then June Jordan (tried to dispel audience fears by saying black feminism must be separated from convos of sexuality) Some lesbians saw Jordan as a traitor

“Sister is an action and it is also a form of recognition.”

“As Cherie Moraga remembers it, ‘she really got a lot of joy out of sexuality. She would be butch when it was appropriate, she would be femme when it was appropriate.”

“I mean, I’ve seen her flirt with everybody. I mean, all races. One gender. I’ve seen her flirt regardless of previous conditions of servitude, you know what I mean? She really liked women. But the bedrock was, she really respected women.”

Forests - biodiverse habitats full of life that grow at different speeds, support one another, etc.

Tree plantations - most of the “forests” in the USA, grown uniformly with the goal to block sound from highways or to grow as quickly and as straight as possible for immediate human consumption

“Most of the large groups of trees on this continent now are not forests, they are plantations. Wood is sticky, it is full of natural glue, or sap, and paper pulp makers have to mix it with chemicals that make the fibers of the tree act like they don’t know eachother. Does something of the tree come back if we use paper to tangle ourselves together, insist on our connection, stick together?”

“Not only did she refuse to wear a stuffed bra, she made asymmetrical necklaces to highlight her evolution. That archive of survival? She wore it on her chest.”

Audre’s mastectomy

“Every tree holds an archive; concentric layers of evidence, proof of how the tree moved past its limits and grew. But, the limits are there. You can read the record of the early freeze, the drought, the fungus, the hungry beetles. Every tree holds an archive of its own survival, but to see the record, you have to cut it down.”

“For the scientifically literate land animal, the abyss is an abyss, yes, because of the lack of light because it is four miles deep, but most of all, because it is unknowable.”

“Fatherless household” ….or Motherful household

Killing yourself instead of children = “we each need to kill the part of ourselves that uses rhetoric to insist on our own innocence so that something new can come from ourselves and our world.”

- holding political/police/military violence accountable and seeking justice/peace as one our of civic responsibilities.

“The violence of policing remained key in Audre’s critique of transnational racism. She connected police violence against children in NYC with the massacre of schoolchildren in Soweto by South African military police. She connected the function of the police in the USA with their military presence in Grenada, Nicaragua, and so many places around the world.”

“There is little to make a Black officer blue, other than sadness.”

Blue lives matter = murder of black brown cops by white cops

“I will eat the last signs of my weakness, remove the scars of old childhood wars, and dare to enter the forest whistling.”

Audre believed that emotional suppression was what killed her own father (his heart problems/aneurysm)

“I’d rather kill my son than have him grow up to be like some of the men I know.” - Audre in an interview when her son was 13. DAMN