Hello and please feel free to become a paying subscriber of this project if you are able and appreciate this project existing and continuing. There are endless kinds of exchanges we can make for the value of peoples’ art and time, and to the ones who put a dollar value on this exchange, know that I am endlessly grateful.
(On exchanges and offerings generally, please enjoy this latest episode of one of my favorite podcasts, How to Survive the End of the World with the Brown sisters who are having a listening party for Autumn’s first album, highly recommend. At the very start of the episode is a lovely conversation about offerings and exchanges that come from the heart. That come from a sense of wanting to connect to someone out there in the world. That do not come primarily from a sense of capitalism, but instead just needing to create something because you just have to.)
I was told recently by someone after I asked a question related to my safety at my child’s school1, that they didn’t discuss politics at said event. They said this with an air of incredulity even, maybe because it was a birthday party? Maybe because for them politics is a choice or a dinner conversation topic you choose or not to engage with. Maybe because, for them, politics function to keep all their existing systems and privileges functioning exactly as they should. So what’s to discuss? I don’t know exactly, because that is always where the conversation ends with this person.
The personal is the political. The poet, playwright and essayist June Jordan was well-known for living this ideology. I was recently reminded of the power of her work through a zoom workshop that Alexis Pauline Gumbs facilitated about Jordan’s teachings and legacy which I listened to while at home caretaking for my kids, eating dinner with my mother. At home, the site of so much of my thinking, working and life. My home which looks so very different from the one I grew up in, both in Forest Hills, Queens and Sayreville, New Jersey. Or various homes I’ve made around Brooklyn, Manhattan, Queens, or Danbury.
There’s a lot to say about the making of this home and it’s all political. It’s an idea I fell in love with going back to the intergenerational expansive family home my own family modeled for me in Mumbai. It’s a story wrought with climate change and the destruction of my childhood home in New Jersey in Hurricane Sandy’s wake, bringing my parents to live with my young family in Brooklyn, capitalism, gentrification, marriage, divorce, colonialism and migrations which brought my family to Queens, NYC in the first place. I live in Bedstuy, Brooklyn now, a few subway stops from where I was born in Queens, but I’m definitely not of this neighborhood, not feeling of most places most days, not relating to being American or Indian or any identity tying me to a nation wrapped up neatly by violent colonial borders. There are other ways I identify that feel more true to me.
But after the family’s move to Bedford Stuyvesant in Brooklyn, Jordan’s father became prone to fits of anger and violence--much of it directed at his daughter. Many years later she would write of the abuse in “Soldier: A Poet’s Childhood” (Basic Civitas Books, 2000). She was never quite sure what inspired his rages: “My father had to withstand tremendous humiliation and also fear,” she said in a 2000 interview in Z Magazine. “[He] was afraid that he would fail to prevent me from failing.” Her father wanted her to be fearless, a soldier, as he prepared her for “life as a black person in this country.”2
To know me, you have to know my father. But if he was alive, you might know a different me. I am me, in this form, because he is no longer. Because he gave me the ever-lasting gift of loving me well in his dying. Which healed much of the years of abuse and narcissism. Which made me remember I was also loved very well in between all the hard.3 It’s the relationship which broke and forged me, and taught me how to fight. Taught me how to love like a religion. Like Jordan’s father, he was my first battleground. The often surprise attack of these battles left me with a forever uncanny ability to see your next move coming before you even begin to formulate it as a thought in your head. It’s also left me with multiple fucking challenges, that I have no choice but to work on daily and make into my own version of strengths. I try not to focus too long these days on the myriad ways I am deficient, scarred, imperfect in my communications because of him. Because that is also his legacy on me, the constant critic and unsatisfied perfectionist. That is also what this society wants me to be. Brooding in a forever soup of how imperfect I am, questioning my every action so that I never get over myself. So that I do not stand in my power.
Reading June Jordan’s account of her father’s relationship with her in Soldier just simply makes me feel seen. It’s the account of a girl raised in Harlem and Brooklyn to Jamaican immigrants written through with the intersections of Blackness and that forever working-class immigrant striving story in one of the toughest best cities to live in.
Jordan’s accounting is straightforward. Large swaths of her book are simply laying out what occurred, which to the untrained eye, may seem simple, but to all who say true hard things, we know is anything but. From Soldier:
My father assumed all of the chores of the regular cleaning and all of the major cooking, especially Jamaican rice and peas, which he prepared in weekly amounts ample enough to feed a family of twelve.
And once in a while he would feel himself so full of steam he’d try to hug or dance with my mother. But she always pushed him away.
Within that perpetual bustling about our house, I never saw my parents embrace or hold hands.
Anyway can I just say, off note, fuck those artists who don’t fuck up their main grid with posts about Gaza, compelled to keep the messy in the temporal aspect of the stories. If you are still, under the conditions of a genocide backed by our government, concerned with the beauty or acceptability of your Instagram grid, I have questions. If you don’t post in your stories at all and you have an audience as an artist, I don’t even remotely trust your art because whatever you make is clearly concerned with selling itself. Sorry anyway, I just got off-topic.
Why do I feel unsafe then? What was that reference about regarding my child’s school earlier? Yes we do get to talk about that in this essay, because that’s exactly what the personal is the political means. It’s all relevant. It’s all political and interconnected. Your friends, your job, your home, your school. These are also the battlegrounds. They care very much what happens in these places. That’s why school boards are the site of so much backlash and violence across this country. I’m part of one, no longer called school boards in NYC, mine is the Community Education Council for District 14 in Brooklyn, representing Greenpoint, Williamsburg, Bedstuy and Bushwick. It’s headed by a Tajh Sutton, a Black woman, a brilliant person and force of love and fierceness I’m honored to call a friend, she is a parent who grew up in District 14, went to the schools she visits now as a parent and CEC member. We made a human-centered, anti-genocide, naming settler colonial state4, loving inclusive statement back in October on our Instagram. A short while later we were one of a few organizations to sponsor a student-led walkout for peace in Gaza in NYC. Because of both of these actions, we have been the site of incredible violence. People coming to our zoom meetings and both verbally and in the chat saying the most heinous, racist, vile things you could imagine. Seven or eight NYPost garbage articles about us and our President. Doxxing. Death threats to our district phone line. Death threats to our email. Actual human feces sent to our district office. This is supposedly all because we are anti-Semitic. We know, because we see this playing out in education spaces, from Harvard, to Columbia, to CUNY, to individual public schools that the people benefiting from existing power structures staying in place do not like simple basic truths being named, and especially not being uttered anywhere near children or young people who are learning the true names of things.
We also know because of the backlash how powerful our voices are. But the power of our voices is partly due to the vacuum of silence we exist inside of. When so few people speak out, the ones who do get targeted because they are powerful. We need everyone to speak, we always did.
It turns out my own children’s elementary school is the site of a lot of the violence and organizing by individual parents around this narrative that anyone who speaks truthfully about Palestinians or wears a keffiyeh or protests against the ongoing genocide is anti-Semitic. It’s been heartbreaking to learn but not at all surprising. I have suffered minor heartbreaks all along the way of discovering this progressive school is not what we thought it was. And like the nuanced story of my father and I, at this school, I have also watched my kids grow up, make lasting friendships, be nurtured by individual educators I remain in awe of, struggle, be sad, and persevere, and seen all the ordinary joys of watching your children grow up in relative safety. But we don’t stay silent because this is our school or our home or our marriage or our relationship. We don’t stay silent because it would upset others to know they hurt us or others. So we wrote a letter informing parents and community members about what is going on at my child’s school. A beloved educator is being doxxed and disciplined for wearing a keffiyeh at school and his social media posts, specifically the one that said “from the river to the sea”, is making certain families feel unsafe. He is a brown Hispanic educator who grew up in the South side of Williamsburg who is currently on a forced unpaid suspension from his literal job after being doxxed and written up in the Post, but yes tell me again about your feelings. Actual harm. To a BIPOC body. Not theoretical.5 If you feel moved to send a letter to my school’s admin asking them to keep this educator safe from the harm he has been facing, reach out to me and I’ll give you more information.
If you want to read what we as a CEC are facing, here is one article about it. Here’s another article that talks about how we are one of the very few CECs in all of NYC that actually has student representatives on our council. Something the CEC14 is intensely proud of is the way we have prioritized student voice for years. And sadly since October of last year, students have stopped coming to our meetings, because of the violence and intensity of the backlash. We don’t blame them, these last few meetings, I don’t want to be there either. A space that exists for young people, is no longer safe for them because of the violence of the few6 screaming racist, hatred things at us for standing up for Palestinian people who are being murdered indiscriminately, having their homes destroyed, bombed. I can’t stop thinking of Rafah, where Palestinians were all told to go within Gaza and now they are being killed and threatened and starved and bombed in, and Hind. Dear dear 6-year old Hind. If you need your news coming from a US or UK paper, read about Hind here. Just do not look away.
All the distractions with us and teachers and school boards and words is the point, for us to look away from the horrors. But do not do that. To be forever changed, to have any hope of stopping this, we must first be able to see clearly and name it.
We are who we are, in every space. In our homes, schools, intimate relationships, in our jobs. We are our actions, our words, our apologies, our efforts. We are our attempts at humanity. We are also our attempts at dehumanizing a bunch of unpaid elected working mothers striving to create a world where all children are seen as worthy. It is all political. Don’t ever get it twisted.
yes girl yes
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2002-jun-20-lv-jordan20-story.html
It’s so hard to remember the good in a traumatized brain sometimes. When I first had my own children, and saw my father care for them, that was the first time I had the glimmer of the good memories. To see him love my babies was to remember I too was well-loved. That I knew how to hold them because I had been held. Our memories of our relationships to people are not static, we remember through a lens and that lens sometimes needs to be complicated, especially if it has held the reins for far too long.
yes just like this one. we also live on stolen land. we must name it everywhere.
Just like the actual ongoing murders happening right now to Palestinians. Actual violence. Actual genocide.
often privileged