[Revisit] Survival Is A Promise with Alexis Pauline Gumbs

This episode originally aired in August 2024.

We gather to honor the luminous legacy of Audre Lorde through the lens of Alexis Pauline Gumbs' radiant new book, Survival Is a Promise. Alexis joins us to unveil the journey of crafting Audre's biography, a tribute to the vibrant pulse and power of Audre’s words and practice. Together, we revel in the profound lessons Audre imparted on us about survival, courage, and love.

Alexis’ new book is available now, Survival Is a Promise: The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde, and you can follow her work here @alexispauline

Read the transcript for this conversation here

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The Becoming the People Podcast Team:
Producers: Prentis Hemphill & devon de Leña
Sound Engineer and Editing: Michael Maine
Research Assistant: Bhavana Nancherla
Original Music: Mayyadda

Transcript

SPEAKER_05 0:07

There are certain writers, certain thinkers, certain theorists whose work is not only of their time, but somehow it finds a way to echo across time and finds usefulness for so many people long after they're gone. One of those writers, thinkers, to me is Audrey Lorde, who, even if you haven't read a lot of Audrey Lorde, which I recommend you do, you are still surrounded in many ways by the way she thought, the questions she asked, her practice. Even as we try to meme or reduce Audrey Lorde's offerings to bite-sized chunks, there's still something pulsating and powerful at the core of her words that we still have to confront. Audrey Lord is, of course, not on today's podcast directly, but we still get to commune with her through the work of another writer and poet who I think we will be revisiting in generations to come, also, and that's Alexis Pauline Gums. Alexis is a dear friend of mine, a writer. She has written several books that you should check out: Spill, MArchive, Dub, and she's recently written a book about Audrey Lorde called Survival is a Promise: The Eternal Life of Audrey Lorde. And in true form of Alexis Pauline Gums, this is an unorthodox and exciting visitation of on Audrey Lorde's life. We are drawn into moments, stories, questions, Audrey's experiences, but we're also asked to understand Audrey Lord's practice as something that we might take on, a way of being in the world, of relating to the world that is also of us. It's an incredible work. It's an incredible book that I highly recommend that you get. And we are really lucky to have Alexis Pauling Gums on the episode today to talk about survival, to talk about courage, to talk about love through the life and the practice of Audrey Lorde. Please, please, please go get this book. Go get it for somebody else too. And I really hope you enjoy today's episode. Alexis, it's it's really a joy and an honor to be back in conversation with you. So first, thank you for doing this, for coming back to talk to us.

SPEAKER_00 2:50

Absolutely. Oh, thank you so much. I yeah, I've been looking forward to this.

SPEAKER_05 2:57

Me too. But also, I have all these butterflies because I know I won't have enough time for all the questions that I have. So I will try to stay grounded and be in the flow. Um, but I have so many questions for you. You have just written, and maybe by the time this airs, you will have released your newest book, Survival is a Promise, The Eternal Life of Audrey Lorde, which is a biography of Audrey Lorde. But it's written in a really interesting way, which we'll we'll talk about some. But thank you for that too. It it feels so right on time for us to be able to sit at the feet of Audrey Lorde um through your excavation and through your witnessing. So thank you for that and congratulations to us for this offering. Thank you.

SPEAKER_00 3:52

Oh, yeah, congratulations to us, is right. It definitely has been a communal effort. So I'm really grateful.

SPEAKER_05 3:58

And that's what we're going to talk about today because it's there's just so much to it, and I'm I'm still diving into it, but it feels so warm and so inviting. I opened it up and I was like, oh, I want to be here. I want to be in these questions and on this journey. I want to just ask you first about Audrey Lorde, because it, you know, my sense is that she is someone that you've walked with or listened to for a long time. So I wonder if you could just talk to us about what Audrey Lorde has meant to you and um maybe a little bit about why you think this offering is especially important right now.

SPEAKER_00 4:40

Yes. Audrey has walked with me for a long time and almost on a lot of different frequencies. So I first started reading her poems when I was 14 years old, and I became obsessed. My mom knows they were on my walls, they were um the epigraphs to all my little high school essays and assignments. It was just like, how can I bring her with me? And because I now realize because she was just opening space, you know, I I felt like once she said something, nothing that I would want to try to say could be impossible anymore. That was the impact of her poetry on me, and so yeah, I just have this depth of gratitude, but so then maybe because of that, maybe because of being on an Audrey Lorde frequency, I really did start to attract Audrey Lorde's people, like her students, her mentees, her partner, you know, that these people would become a part of my life. And it seemed like everywhere I went, the people I was connecting with, the people I was intersecting with, their lives had also been changed by Audrey Lorde. And they would talk about I mean, it's interesting to think about. I didn't get a whole bunch of details about Audrey Lorde's life from these folks at that time. What I got was their sense that it was like there was before Audrey and there was after Audrey. And they would talk about who they became. Speaking of the name of this podcast, they would they would talk about how they became more brave, how they became honest, how they left that job, how they spoke their truth, how they shifted cycles in their families, like the things that they did that Audrey Lorde herself in their lives, or Audrey Lorde's words as they reach these people. So it was like testimony after testimony. And of course, I had my own testimony, like what Audrey Lorde has made possible for me is a kind of eternal rigor with myself. You know, like there is always another question. It is possible to ask again, okay, what's underneath that? And to know that that is a political imperative. And it is an act of collective love, even when it feels so personal, and even when it's happening, you know, in the in the dark depths of whatever scares me about myself. You know, Audrey Lourdes was somebody who had a lot of nightmares her whole life, and she would go there. She would say, My nightmares are my teachers, and so what is it, what is it that scares me the most? I'm going right there. And I mean, what an approach. Yeah, you know, yeah.

SPEAKER_05 8:07

To go toward the nightmare. I'm one of those people I've had nightmares a lot throughout my life, and yeah, there's so much um information inside of them, but it's so easy too to be like, oh, let me leave that in the night. Let me leave that in the dream space and not revisit that. I want to um just go back to the way that you were just talking about her and her impact on people's lives and the relationships around her. She made you said people became more brave, more honest. And I think there's a way in the book to you talk about her, she feels almost like a force, a force of nature, specifically a force of nature in the book. And I I just wonder, you know, I you talk about her relationship with the natural world, um, but also this this real sense I get that she is of it, um, that she is also a force the same way the rains might be or hurricane might be, or you know, anything, any kind of natural occurrence. I does that ring true to you, or how did you experience her as a force or a force of nature?

SPEAKER_00 9:25

I think she is a force of nature, and I think actually we all are, right? I mean, we we all are nature's expression, but I think she knew that. And that's what that's what it to me is the thing. It's like, it's one thing, like, yes, we're all nature, it's another thing, like we're not out here self-identifying as you know, hurricanes. But she did. And I mean, this is something that was, I think, the breakthrough that became my guide for how to approach this book was that Audrey Lorde so profoundly identified as a part of this earth. It was everywhere. You know, I was just looking at her preface to Undersong. So after Hurricane Hugo, she basically went back and rewrote her whole body of work. It was this interesting recovery, like her process of recovery was this process of revision. But then she is describing in the preface what does the revision of poem means mean to her? And she says, Well, you have to get to the bedrock of the poem and then the molten light that comes through. And it's like, but it's not a metaphor for her, you know. She she literally, after sending back the copy edits for that manuscript, she went to Kilauea. She like literally went to a volcano to complete that cycle. And it was like a light went on for me when I realized that none of it was metaphorical for her. Yeah, there wasn't a separation, like, oh, I'm here, I'm on a planet, I'm gonna make a metaphor so people can understand human relations by looking at nature as an example. She was like, This is this is our relationship. We are this planet. Yeah, this planet geologically is still a star. It is still becoming itself. And our illusions, I mean, imagine the arrogance to think that we just are already who we are. This billions of year old planet is not even already what it is, right? So, like, if the very ground we stand on is in process, our illusions of stability, our resistance to change, our insistence on an ego idea that we really know who we are, and it's just a matter of explaining it to other people, is absurd in that context. And that's part of why I really want that aspect of who Audrey Lorde is to be accessible and to be inviting. You know, it means a lot that you said you opened it and you were like, oh, I want to be here. Because I was like, that's what I want people to be like, oh, I get to like spend time in this. It's a space of love. Of course, it's a space of love and gratitude because I love Audrey Lorde. I'm grateful for Audrey Lorde. But I also wanted it to feel like, you know, here's the most rigorous being I could possibly think of. Most challenging. You know, she had her students keep in their dream journals, was like, right about that nightmare. That might not have been their poetic process, right? But it was that semester, you know, like she just was like, let's go. But I want folks to feel like that other piece, right? Which is she was such a profoundly loving person. She understood that our process of transformation is an intimate process. And the generosity, my experience of life is, you know, I see Audrey Lorde everywhere. And that's what I want. I'm like, what what if yeah, what if other people could have that experience where they're looking at a tree and they actually are seeing they're seeing the black feminist saying, Are you doing your work?

SPEAKER_05 13:30

You know, like like that that maybe I want to just um go maybe another layer deeper into the how you wrote the book, because I I hear you saying how you wanted people to engage with it, how you wanted it to feel. And you know, when I was writing notes about the the way the book felt to me, one of these things was that I I think I wrote it felt kind of uh elemental in a way, like earth doesn't sit outside of the writing, that the waters come in and the questions come in. And I I feel you kind of drawing us into how does this experience change the way you live? How can you ask this question of yourself through Audrey's experience? So I wonder if you could just touch on your approach to writing this book, because it doesn't feel conventional in some ways, biography where you're just laying out in this year, this happened, it it feels more elemental in that way of kind of belonging to the earth to me, belonging to processes.

SPEAKER_00 14:32

My writing process is definitely immersive. And I did relate to this book as a place to live. Like I'm building a place where I can live and be transformed by Audrey Lorde in order to make a space where we can live and be transformed by Audrey Lorde. So it has to be expansive enough that not only can I live there, but I can invite other people into it. And it has to be homeful enough that I can stay, you know, and I can stay when Audrey's telling me, it's really great, you know, that you want to write about my relationship with my dad, which ended too soon. And you're gonna have to deal with your relationship with your dad, which ended too soon.

SPEAKER_04 15:18

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 15:19

The power of Audrey Lourdes, and this is part of the rigor of Audrey Lourdes, was that she did not believe that anything in her life was separate from the lives of the people in her community or from the planet as a whole. And she disrupted at every point for people to be like, oh, let me let's look at you. And this is something that's about you. And she's like, well, if you can see it in me, that means that it's actually us.

SPEAKER_05 15:43

That's right.

SPEAKER_00 15:44

It's always relationships. And and so there's just no, I mean, I'm not saying anything about, I mean, I guess I am saying something about the form of biography by doing it differently. But you know, there's gotta be different ways to do things.

SPEAKER_01 15:58

To me, it would not have been possible to write a biography of Audrey Lloyd that was just like, behold, you know, this being over here, you know, we could be objective, we could, you know, be linear.

SPEAKER_00 16:14

Like, I couldn't do that. And I actually don't think I would write such a sustained immersive text about a life that I didn't feel so changed by in each encounter. But the thing about the thing that Audrey Lloyd teaches me is that that's every life.

SPEAKER_05 16:33

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 16:33

I mean, you can just look at the pictures of like, you know, someone comes to talk to her and she's like, well, first of all, she's super nearsighted like I am, but she's like leaning in, you know, like she's like, this, what is it gonna be? You know, like this conversation is gonna change my life. And when you talk about the timeliness, I think that that is how we need to live. You know, that that's that's what I love about your work and where you lead us. It's like we do need to be so curious about what we feel, about who we are together, about what Earth is. And we need to be able to feel this is what Audrey Lorde understood her poetry to be for the possibility that we could actually feel whatever we're hiding from feeling, and then allow that to guide us to live intentionally. Yes. I just think Audrey Lorde is like somewhere praise dancing about your work, about you know, the existence of this whole movement that you are a part of and making space for all of us in. For me, it feels profoundly connected.

SPEAKER_05 17:47

Thank you for that reflection because it I do feel all the time how made possible I am by Audrey Lorde and what she understood. And, you know, there was a way I think I read her first when I was probably 16 or 17. I got zombie at the used book store in Arlington, Texas. And, you know, I think it's one of those relationships where I revisit her and I'm like, oh, I understand more now, I understand more now, I understand more now. I I actually have a good friend, and I told her that every year I I read her work about the erotic every year because I come back to it and I'm like, oh, got it. Oh, okay, I see, I see. But it feels like a lifelong relationship and conversation where I feel so clarified by what she has done and offered and articulated, and really grateful for that. But we have to talk about survival. We have to talk about survival because that's the title of the book is survival is a promise. I think in the first paragraph of the first chapter, the word survival is in there, and you know, if you have read Audrey Lorde, you know that survival is so much of what she's up to. I guess that's what I am most curious about is what did you learn about what survival means or for you? And I I really, you know, as I was reading the book, I was like just thinking about this moment and how tuned in I often feel to kind of like nihilism, nihilist trends are are very warranted, despairing. And I think about the survival, it seems that she's often talking about is really a transformative survival by necessity. When she writes Who Said It Was Simple? I I have that poem everywhere when she talks it in which which me will survive all these liberations. I'm thinking about survival as a transformative, liberating process and not the kind of narrow survival, it's just good enough to survive way that we often talk about it. So, all that said, I'm curious what you've learned about survival, why, and maybe why you name the book Survival's a Promise.

SPEAKER_00 19:59

Yeah, it's it's important. Audrey Lloyd has such an expansive definition of survival, and it's a key term. It's definitely a key term in her work, but it's also a key term in her conversations, right? It's a key black feminist term of a time period. So I have so much to say about this. So every other 10 sections of the book, everyone, in my opinion, kind of offers a different iteration of Audrey Laure's definition of survival. But the reason that it's called survival is a promise is it's almost a paraphrasing. So my favorite essay by Audrey Lorde, which it's eye to eye, black women, hatred and anger. Oh man, so good. And this is where we get, you know, we can learn to mother ourselves. This is where we get I am who I am doing what I came to do.

SPEAKER_05 20:48

We have to study how to be tender with each other until it becomes a good idea.

SPEAKER_00 20:51

Yeah. That, you know, it's it's it's so profound. And that is an essay that came out of so many different conversations. And I love that she cites the conversations in the beginning of where it when it appears in Sister Outsider. But so there's a draft in her manuscript archives where just kind of like on the side, you know, because she uses the word survival multiple times in that essay, and she says, I love the word survival. To me, it sounds like a promise. But it gives me the question, or like it makes me ask, what is the shape of my impact upon this earth? And I remember when I saw that and I was like, whoa. Because, you know, at that time, I'm like preparing to write this dissertation on queer survival of black feminism. And I love the word survival. And so I ended up writing an essay called The Shape of My Impact that was inspired by that musing, you know, like it's just it's just amusing that the thought that she's having that she wants to record for herself in her. Process. But if it's a promise, what is that promise? And and you know, you talk about the nihilism, the grief. I know I'm feeling outrage, the um, our responses to the clarity of the violence that we're witnessing, multiple forms of violence that we're witnessing. And then I think about I think about Audrey Lorde, I think about Audrey Lorde's generation. You know, I think about Audrey Lorde, June Jordan, Tony K. Bambara, for example, three children in elementary school, and like growing up, like figuring out what life is, people tell them they got to hide under their desks. Yeah, because they could be bombed at any moment. The atomic bomb is invented down the street. Like they live in Harlem. The atomic bomb is created at Columbia, and then they hear it on the radio when it's unleashed over here at Shima.

SPEAKER_04 22:54

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 22:54

And Audrey Lloyd remembers her father saying, humanity can now destroy itself. And so I think about, you know, sometimes it's like we got the 24-hour news cycle, we have the internet, we have young people right now growing up, and they actually know about every single different type of crisis that's happening in real time, and it's overwhelming. And we have this climate grief and you know, all of that. And then I think about the fact that we have these teachers, and these are just three that I'm personally obsessed with, you know. But we have we have these teachers who really sat with that. Audrey Lloyd started writing about apocalypse in her poetry at like 12 years old, you know, like this this is like her practice, and she turned to poetry to ask herself the question she articulated later how much of this pain can I use? Right, which me will survive. So when I think about why were these black feminists using the term survival, why did it mean so much? It did not mean subsistence.

SPEAKER_04 23:56

Right.

SPEAKER_00 23:57

It was because they literally grew up into the question of will this species destroy itself or not? Or when? And this is what was at stake for them. They were they were all environmental scholars. They haven't been acknowledged as such, right? But they were. They were thinking about Earth, they were thinking on the scale of the planet, they were thinking about asteroids and meteors, they were thinking about the nuclear conundrum and its impact on communities of color. They were thinking about environmental justice and environmental racism, not under those terms. And they understood a black feminist commitment to be a commitment to survival, never on an individual scale. You know, it wasn't like how can I individually live through this? Otherwise, you know, their actions would have been completely different actions. The actions that they took were offerings towards our collective survival. Is it possible that this like purposeful love moves through, continues to exist in another form? With a lot of clarity that, you know, Audrey Lorde says, this didn't start with me, it won't end with me. And you know, many people have said different versions of that, that they understood themselves to be beneficiaries of a certain insistence on survival that should be accessible to us.

SPEAKER_04 25:22

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 25:23

And that's what Audrey Lorde believed. She believed if I truly live my purpose, then this, you know, sometimes she called it a fund of energy. This fund of energy that my life has been part of will continue in some form. She was very clear about she wouldn't really know or recognize even the forms that it would continue in. It wasn't limited by what she could imagine.

SPEAKER_04 25:45

Right.

SPEAKER_00 25:45

But she was committed to it through her purposeful life. And so that's what makes her life eternal to me.

SPEAKER_05 25:52

Right.

SPEAKER_00 25:53

That her actual definition of life was an eternal definition. And, you know, my curiosity with this book is can we live like that? What are what are the things that we would do now if we understood our survival to be collective? If we understood and felt the love that constitutes us and opened a way for it to move forward, opened a way for it to include beings that we can't even imagine.

SPEAKER_05 26:26

The best thing about this podcast and the hardest thing is that sometimes I just want to sit back and let it wash over me. I just want to cry. I just want to release. Right. That's right. I find, if I'm if I'm being very honest, when I read Audrey Lorde, I can feel my own fear of, you know, she talks about like, you know, what will happen if we don't act or speak or do or be ourselves. But I think that's not actually where I feel most fear when I read her. It's actually, I I at times can feel afraid of fully being in my power in a way that I feel like she calls us to.

SPEAKER_01 27:14

That's the part. That's the part. That is the part.

SPEAKER_05 27:20

Talk to me about that part for for me and for everyone else listening.

SPEAKER_00 27:25

Oh my goodness. I mean, I can say for myself that so much has been so scary about this process. You know, it's like sometimes maybe we could try to avoid to do what matters to us most because it matters to us so much.

SPEAKER_05 27:43

Right.

SPEAKER_00 27:43

And for me, I mean, you know, I I do I have felt that it's my responsibility to teach people about Audrey Lourdes. You know, I had the huge privilege of being the first person to visit her manuscript archives, and I've been able to spend so much time there. And to me, that means, you know, I gotta spread the word. Zan Kite parlay a lot, they say in in Kerry Kou, those who heard tell the other ones. Okay. And so I'm like, well, listen, like, people need to know. And I want to live in a world where people, you know, know and are intimate with and love Audrey Lorde. But, you know, I was scared of the form of the biography. I was scared because in my imagination, a biography is so definitive. And, you know, people have their definitions of Audrey Lorde's life for exactly the reasons I was just saying. Like Audrey Lorde has changed people's lives, and people feel an ownership that has to do with the intimacy of how deeply she has changed them.

SPEAKER_04 28:44

Right.

SPEAKER_00 28:45

And I'm one of those people, but who am I to say this is who she was? So the approach that I take is I'm not really trying to foreclose like this, you know, I'm the expert, this is what it is, this is who she was. I really want us to be able to wonder about her because she is a wonder of the world and a force of nature.

SPEAKER_04 29:05

Right.

SPEAKER_00 29:05

I want us to be able to wonder about her, like have really well-researched wonder, like wonder even more specifically about what does it take to speak a truth that you're afraid to speak when you know the consequences? What does it mean to be an out Black lesbian in a nationalist homophobic black arts movement, for example? But it's the same thing, I think, that gave Audrey Lloyd the strength to say to her doctors, who are like basically you're gonna live six more months, to say, like, or I can change my whole life and live 12 more years. Like, you know, like that, like that, and I do believe, and this is a well-researched opinion, that she was like, if I can live through this homophobia and these death threats and this like disgust about the my very being, I can actually have a conversation with the cells inside my own body that are like, I got more things. Right. I have more things that are part of my responsibility. That's right. And anyway, all that is to say, Audrey Lorde knew that she was powerful, and that was not what distinguished her from other people for her. That's what she had in common with everyone else. Which is why she was so rigorous with everyone. You know, I'm doing my work, are you doing yours? She understood everybody had a work to do that is as great as she understood her work to be, and she was here for it. Like, are you doing it? You know, like how could how can I support it? How can I participate in it? And in a time where we can feel so isolated and we can feel like, you know, we've been protesting about the same thing for our whole lives, and um it hasn't had the impact that maybe we would have dreamed that it would have. For me, Audrey Lorde is like it doesn't that's not where our power comes from. And we actually never get to give up and say, well, since the power I wish I had is not what power is looking like in my life right now, I don't have any power. And that there is something bigger, whether it's the geology, whether it's the infinite love, and we have to play our part in it. Right. And to and to me, it's like, okay, you know, this biography is a part of my assignment. I I could be afraid for only so long. Like I gotta get over it. And I also have to open, like keep opening my heart for how it's gonna feel, how it's gonna change me. You know, you know, I'm in there like recording the audiobook, like healing parts of myself I didn't know was was supposed to be healed by the book the whole time I was writing it, you know.

SPEAKER_05 32:08

Oh boy.

SPEAKER_00 32:09

Like Audrey is just like surrender because there's more. And and we will we will create vibrationally, tangibly, the world that the love that fills us implies, and we will have to let go of the lies we told ourselves about how we're not loved, we're not that big, we're not that brave, we can't do it. It's not up to me. Whatever, whatever the story is. And so it is such a gift to you know feel Audrey Lord's eyes on me always. And it is, you know, I feel like one of the first words I said was rigor. It is a form of rigor, and it doesn't, it doesn't say rigor like you gotta do more or Alexis, you gotta work hard. Or I mean, the rigor of her saying, I want to save my life, I'm gonna leave New York City, I'm gonna eat foods that are beyond the pesticide system of the United States. Yeah, I'm going to like rest more deeply, love more deeply, swim more, like laugh more. Like I need to live in the Caribbean with another black woman who will eat mango out of my hand. You know what I'm saying? Like, like that this is this that's her not giving up. That's right. So, like, our not giving up doesn't mean like close the door, put your head down, you know, try to be more productive. Our not giving up is like, oh, I mean, Audrey Lorde's mother wanted to move back to the Caribbean and never was able to. And it was like moving back to the Caribbean is something that you talk about, but you can't do it. And she had to let go and be like, or what are the terms under which I actually can do it? And what becomes possible when I have to choose between the limiting story I have about what's possible in my life and my life itself. You have to do it to save your life. It's clarifying.

SPEAKER_05 34:21

Absolutely. And the generosity, I mean, it's a generosity that I always feel in you, in your work, in your practice, and it's a generosity that I'm you know understanding more as you speak in in Audrey Lorde's work too. That that's the that's how we survive. That's right. That's how we survive, yeah. We're nearing the end of time, but I I want to maybe very clumsily ask a question about this moment in time because I know you hosted um a call recently where you were reading Audrey Lorde's Equal Opportunity essay and relating it, I think I I wasn't able to attend, but relating it to this moment, this moment in electoral politics, I'll say in in the US to be very specific, where black womanness is represented. I wouldn't necessarily say a black feminist approach, but black womanness. I think you it's not at all. But I have so many, I have so many questions and and really would just love to hear your thoughts. Because I do, you know, when I look at this time, there's just so many levels to it for me, or at least some very important levels. I I think that the black womann-ness of it is not we can't act as though there's not some kind of importance to that and some meaning to that. And how we live our lives, what our lives mean, what we are committed to, how deeply we are living our values, these questions that Audrey Lorde really brings to the surface feel like very, very central questions in this time and also I don't know if tricky is the right word. I think more and more I just keep thinking, none of us get through this innocent. You know, it's a thing I'm always thinking. There's no there's no innocence for any of us. I just wonder if there are things that you found in in reading her work that you feel like would help us in our discernment and our right action or right enough action in in this moment. What do you see?

SPEAKER_00 36:30

Yeah, sometimes I think about I'm like, I feel like I should just have a series that's like, what would Audrey say? You know, because I because everything I see on the news, I'm like immediately sent back into her work. And, you know, I want to tell everyone. So we'd welcome okay, okay, well that's good. That's good feedback. Um So Equal Opportunity is this poem that Audrey Laird wrote after US invasion of Grenada, and the like chief chief deputy secretary of defense was a black woman. This is like the highest ranking black woman in the Department of the Def of Defense ever at that time, which was in the early 1980s, right? And so Audrey Lord writes this poem called Equal Opportunity, and she's very vividly juxtaposing this poised, successful black woman speaking about how equitable and diverse the Department of Defense is now. And at the same time, Audrey Loris is interspersing this with images of the women in Grenada who, by people wearing the same uniform, are breaking into their homes, you know, going through their stoves and their cookpots, supposedly looking for what? Looking for communists, quote unquote, somehow in the front, somebody frying pan, but really just like terrorizing. And for me, this understanding of empire and of, you know, Audrey Lorde said the United States is on the wrong side of every freedom struggle on earth, right? This is something that she said more than once, and that was relevant more than once and is relevant now. So she's thinking about what does it mean to embody empire? And what does it mean for the visual of a Black woman in this role in the Department of Defense to still always be in relationship with these Black women who's who have no defense of their homes, right? Whose homes are being invaded in order to sustain that same empire. And so thinking about Kamala Harris, thinking about Sonia Massey, like what is home, right? And this is this is a huge key question of Audrey Lord's work. And she doesn't claim her own innocence, you know, she believed that simply by being a US citizen, she's complicit in the invasion of Grenada, even though she's a daughter of a Grenadian woman, and even though she absolutely supported the Grenadian revolution, she says we have to look at, and this is the other thing, about what is our power and what is our relationship to power. She had to look at her relative power relative to the black woman living in Grenada facing a bayonet from a US officer.

SPEAKER_04 39:35

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 39:36

And so telling these stories, writing these poems is a part of it, obviously her participation in protests, her railing against US military funding, even as she's being awarded New York State Poet Laureate, her speech is all about the funding of the US military and how absurd it is, and how the funding of one outdated tank is more than the arts budget for the entire year. And so I think that we do have to return to Audrey Lorde's nuance, Audrey Lorde's boldness, her reminder that we're always in relationship.

SPEAKER_04 40:12

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 40:13

And I don't know if it's a warning that's been heeded, but I also think to me, it feels like a warning not to use Audrey Lorde's own work to push forward an idea of diversity, equity, and inclusion that supports an empire that is killing people all over the world. So I really wanted to return to that because this is how I feel. Audrey Lorde's poetry holds the space for us to really ask ourselves the questions and really listen for the knowing that we have around our relationship to all of this. You know, like what is what's coming up for us that scares us? And what is the wisdom in that? Because it actually benefits, you know, Audrey Lord would say the rumor that you can't take on City Hall was started by City Hall. It benefits that system that would destroy everything out of the pretense of somehow not being in relationship with Earth, even though it is in relationship with Earth because we are Earth. It benefits if we don't listen to what we know. It benefits them if we're more concerned with being right or seeming virtuous than with really looking at what scares us, what's the transformation, what's the possibility, what were we wrong about?

SPEAKER_03 41:38

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 41:39

And I know part of my role is to is to help create space for that, reflective space for that. Because why should we be right? Like, how would we be right? You know? I do. Like, how would we know anything? And if I think I'm just more right than some other person, probably who I don't know, who's just on social media, could I not understand that I'm just scared of something different than they're scared of? And I actually have a better chance of finding out what I'm scared of than I have of guessing what they're scared of.

SPEAKER_05 42:15

That's right.

SPEAKER_00 42:16

So yeah, I think we need a lot of reflection. I think we need to do it together. I think that we need to remember that we still do always have actions we can take, even if they don't meet some kind of ideal of the power we wish we had. You know, I wish I could just choose who would be the US president and it would be somebody with my same politics.

SPEAKER_04 42:37

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 42:37

But because that's not actually my option right now, what are my options?

SPEAKER_04 42:43

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 42:44

You know, what do they become when I collaborate? What are what humility does change require from me?

SPEAKER_05 42:56

Thank you. Thank you for that question. Thank you for all of it, Alexis. Thank you. I I still have so many questions, but I'm gonna come ask them to you in person.

SPEAKER_01 43:08

I'm right here.

SPEAKER_05 43:11

We could talk about it on the porch, but yeah, until then, waves of gratitude to you for how you listen, for how you love and honor our ancestors and our our living elders. You have held that space so so beautifully, and I have so much gratitude to you for that. And that practice has changed my life. So thank you for that. Thank you for writing this book that we all need survival as a promise, where we can all stir in the questions with Audrey Lorde and with Alexis Pauline Gums and offer our our gratitude, our humility, our willingness to transform to the labor that you both have put into this offering. So thank you, thank you, thank you.

SPEAKER_00 44:02

Thank you, thank you so much for creating and sustaining this space and this possibility. I'm so honored to be a part of the miracle.

SPEAKER_05 44:13

Becoming the People is produced by Devin Delania, sound engineered and edited by Michael Main. Bobna Nanchirla is our research assistant. Our theme song was created by Miyada. If you're enjoying these conversations, please subscribe, rate, and especially please leave us a review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen. You can find more clips of the podcast on my Instagram at Prentice and Pill. And if you'd like to watch the full visual conversations and help us sustain the podcast, please join us on Patreon at Prentice and Pill. Thank you so much for listening to Becoming the People.