Truth

Just wanted to share this that was also reblogged by witchsistah and theoceanandthesky.

*Trigger warning, writing about sexual assault.

This so fully captures what my personal experience of being sexually assaulted late last year as well as the ensuing court case and to be honest also the years of sexual violence I have experienced prior to that. It meant so much to me to read this, cause it can be so difficult to find language to speak to the paralyzing experience I still have when faced with sexual violence. It is difficult to feel entitled to protect my body, to deny others access when my whole life I have been taught that my body is not my own. It is difficult to explain to people who don't live it, that saying no is an enormous privilege.

I still think about how to be nice even when my physical body is being threatened, but I am getting better at not giving two fucks. I would also add as layer, the experience of being a womyn of colour, or in my case as a Black womyn, and worrying about whether people will think I'm a 'bitch' and therefore use the 'angry black womyn' trope to discredit me. I appreciate Malcom X's sentiments in this case, “I have no mercy or compassion in me for a society that will crush people, and then penalize them for not being able to stand up under the weight.”

So what everyone is saying that I need to respond sweetly when someone yells misogynist comments or grabs at me or disregards my constant pleas to leave me alone and then I get blamed for being the cause of the very violence that is being perpetrated against me. Umm, no.

This in part is why I reappropriate words like bitch and cunt. Bitch has been used to dismiss the experiences of violence that we have had, to act like we are entirely unreasonable for being angry when we are being deprived of basic human rights. If you run into me in the streets, I won't have a smile, cause I am protecting myself against racism, misogyny, if I am on a bike, a violent car culture and now, it is also cold.

But when I look across the street and I lock eyes with the adorbs Queer & Trans POC that resist by existing in glitter, bow ties, swagga that won't quit - I remember our resilience. I know we ain't got a choice, but babies you do it with such style, such grace.

Thanks for keeping me whole.

“TW FOR RAPE If we teach women that there are only certain ways they may acceptably behave, we should not be surprised when they behave in those ways.

And we should not be surprised when they behave these ways during attempted or completed rapes. Women who are taught not to speak up too loudly or too forcefully or too adamantly or too demandingly are not going to shout “NO” at the top of their goddamn lungs just because some guy is getting uncomfortably close.

Women who are taught not to keep arguing are not going to keep saying “NO.” Women who are taught that their needs and desires are not to be trusted, are fickle and wrong and are not to be interpreted by the woman herself, are not going to know how to argue with “but you liked kissing, I just thought…”

Women who are taught that physical confrontations make them look crazy will not start hitting, kicking, and screaming until it’s too late, if they do at all.

Women who are taught that a display of their emotional state will have them labeled hysterical and crazy (which is how their perception of events will be discounted) will not be willing to run from a room disheveled and screaming and crying.

Women who are taught that certain established boundaries are frowned upon as too rigid and unnecessary are going to find themselves in situations that move further faster before they realize that their first impression was right, and they are in a dangerous room with a dangerous person.

Women who are taught that refusing to flirt back results in an immediately hostile environment will continue to unwillingly and unhappily flirt with somebody who is invading their space and giving them creep alerts.

People wonder why women don’t “fight back,” but they don’t wonder about it when women back down in arguments, are interrupted, purposefully lower and modulate their voices to express less emotion, make obvious signals that they are uninterested in conversation or being in closer physical proximity and are ignored. They don’t wonder about all those daily social interactions in which women are quieter, ignored, or invisible, because those social interactions seem normal. They seem normal to women, and they seem normal to men, because we were all raised in the same cultural pond, drinking the same Kool-Aid.

And then, all of a sudden, when women are raped, all these natural and invisible social interactions become evidence that the woman wasn’t truly raped. Because she didn’t fight back, or yell loudly, or run, or kick, or punch. She let him into her room when it was obvious what he wanted. She flirted with him, she kissed him. She stopped saying no, after a while. ”

— Harriet J on Another post about rape (via archenemies) Oh my god, this. All of this. (via one-bite-at-a-time)

GYC Profile: T Dot Renaissance

In Praise Of The Vulnerable Femme: The Redux

My breasts sag.

They are small, soft,

Easily laying against my chest

Falling off to the sides

Across them light lines that weave stories like rivers flowing downward to the earth.

I have practiced exactly one thousand positions, casually cupping them, shrouding them

Your eyes averted, kissing around them

You pretend my breasts don’t sag

I pretend my breasts don’t sag

We pretend our breasts don’t sag, pretend our bellies are flat, pretend our hearts do not hurt.

And I want to say that there is power in our softness, in our vulnerability. When I see us in mirrors, biting lips and furrowing brows, I want to drop to my knees womyn and tell you that we are perfection. But we stand in this all together, carrying with us the whispers and shouts of a glossy photoshopped world that tries to will us into non-existence with size 00's and I see you worry that my gaze comes with a judgement but I promise you it doesn't. (And to be clear no shade to my slender sisters, I simply believe that you/we should all get a real number)

Dorothy Allison says “Femme girls dance on razors every day of our lives, and some days it is only bravado that keeps us upright." And womyn I see you, I see you in your fierceness, your anger and your insecurity and I love you in all of it.

I love the many expression of femme-ness, love the subtly and directness in our sexuality, love the war paint, love us knee deep in the swamp and wide eyed in my arms. I love it when you tell me what to do and love it equally when you have no idea.
I want to shield us from the whole world beautifulbrokengorgeous as we are. I think that your round bellies are so sexy, the way you wrap your tight curls/locks/braids/crown is artful and commanding and when you say something crass/brilliant/provocative/brave I.melt.every.single.time.

And I can't fit it all in here, nor will I try, but I promise to tell you all that I love you more. Proudly declare it and treat you preciously. In this patriarchal, racist, mind fuck of a world we are both what is desired and defiled, vessels of power and of shame. A world often surprised by our intelligence and dismayed by our independence.

But babes we are oh so hard on the world, can't help but turn heads and drop jaws. Can't help but free minds and steal hearts. We are scientists and sex workers and when we find each other and find ourselves in each other, I know I am watching god.

And it is oh so hard to love without conditions, to love with the urgency that we deserve, and in defiance of all that opposes blackgirllove.

For the moments we forget, for the moments we can’t find the joy in our arms curve, the blessings in our fat thighs, the bliss in our sagging breasts.

For those moments,

I want to remind us that we are never too much and always enough.

Explosions of stardust

Bodies of pure worship

Magnificent in our ugly

Eternal in our darkness

T Dot Renaissance Elders Dinner: The Trailer

https://

Ancestor Worshipping: T Dot Renaissnce Style

"I walk here because you walked first,"

Since my grandmother passed, I talk to her all the time. In a very real way, since she outgrew her physical body, her fyre has been liberated into the universe surrounding me always. I have come to understand my actions as offerings I give her on the alter that is the life she gifted me with. Knowing this, it has made me more conscious of my actions and their significance backwards (into her arms), forwards (to my babies) and side to side (my community).

But in my experience, in our families, the cycle of hurt, trauma and violence can often mean that love skips a generation. This can look like 'bad parents', 'great grandparents', like endless Aunties and 2 Moms, even 3. This happens in a whole other sorts of ways too, this is not 'the' solitary experience, but one of the experiences that resonates for Folks of Colour. All too often because of slavery, residential schools, wars, silence, our parents didn't learn how to parent because they never enjoyed such a privilege. And at the same time, we also had elders that could turn $20 into 2 weeks of food, that made birthdays feel like national holidays, moved us across oceans and helped us do our homework. 

As children of the diaspora, we also learned how to craft new families, seek our villages in the cities and the hoods. Elders, parents, caregivers can look very different for us.

And it is here is where this idea sprung up. At this intersection between elders and ancestry, at the point between worship and honour and at the place between love and gratitude, we birthed our 'Elder's Dinner'.

For the past year, I have been meeting as part of the T-Dot Renaissance Collective. We are a group of emerging and interdisciplinary artists, working and rooted in Toronto. Emerging from the successful staging of Amanda Parris’s theatrical production, 32C, and her motha luvin incomparable Artistic Direction we have converged to tell a single shared story through different mediums. We will be having our first-ever collective art installation exploring diasporic journeys, from December 3-4^th, 2011 at Loft 404 (located at 404-263 Adelaide St. West). 

And as I met with some of the members of the Audio and Visual Group, Keisha-Monique, Logik Donaldson and Alix Mukonambi, the idea came that we should host a dinner. A dinner for our elders, a dinner where we cook for them and sit with them and ask them questions and hear stories across diasporas, across, decades and oceans, across Ackee & Saltfish and Ugali.

Through all they have done and lived, do they know, I mean really know that they are not alone? And not just as a Black womyn or as a Red womyn, do they get to sit in the collective experience as a Womyn as Men and People of Colour and feel affirmed in knowing that in pain, imperfections, the brilliantbrokenblessed parenting, they cleared space for us to have a resistance? They have given birth to Activists, Artists, Cultural Curators, Fathers, Life Givers? They gave birth to us.

Do you remember when we were little and our elders (parents, caregivers, chosen family) may have suggested that you have a playdate with someone. Maybe because you both like to jump rope, you were both 8 or maybe just cause they wanted to have some adult conversation for an hour...this is not a grown-up play date. Not for the faint of heart, but for the exact opposite.

Welcome to the renaissance.

Learning To Love In The Dark

As I young girl growing up among mostly white people and mostly rich, racist white people. I was left with a long legacy of internalized racism. I think that is why I am so vocal about it, because I know how powerful and destructive the tools of colonialism are. Whether they are movies or Christianity. Anything can and is used as a tool to keep up oppressed, and we must be ever vigilant, because they work. And I want us to be free.

One of the ways I am working to decolonize my spirit, is by loving myself and loving my and our blackness. It has put me in a time in my life where my relationships with Black and Brown Womyn are my priority, to love them and give them my best and that includes myself. Because for a long time, I wasn't very good to myself. And whether it was because at 15, when my boyfriend's mother told me that she was pleased I was not one of those immigrants who were destroying her white middle class neighbourhood. In order not to believe I could be as bad as she described, I instead chose to pretend that I was outside of that. As a mixed race girl, it is one of the 'privileges' that we enjoy, we are able to reject Blackness. White plantation owners would do the paper bag test to us and not our darker skinned sisters, this meant that we had the option of social mobility, even if it was only out of a strategy of divide and conquer, letting a few of us through so we could oppress each other. As Keisha-Monique says, "the most powerful tool of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed".

As someone who has dated a lot of white folks or folks with white privilege and now in a relationship with not only someone who is descriptively Black, but someone who is politically Black American, I am confronting other remnants of that internalized racism, some white guilt I was holding on to, some body issues, so much in fact. And inspired by this radical (remembering that radical means from the roots;) process of loving and healing, is this piece I performed at Leah Lakshmi Piepzna- Samarasinha's launch of the most important and beautiful Love Cake. There are two pieces I perform in this, the first one is a version of a poem I submitted to Soy Forde's Creative Commess Blog Carnival, check out her blog here.

I try to remind myself that there is no purity in any of it, decolonization, even liberation are processes we move in and out of, ebb and flow, live and learn in. There is no inauthenticity in any of it, through it all we Black and Brown, this too is a part of our experience. There is so much nuance, degree in all of it. It's why I love it when we tell our stories, all of them.

Justice

To all the survivors, you beauties made of stardust out there, again I open this post with a trigger warning. I will be talking about sexual assault and know that you don't have to read this if you don't want to.
I decided to press charges.
I learned this morning that the white man who sexually assaulted me on November 4^th, 2010 for over an hour was just found not guilty and acquitted of all charges.
On August 16^th, I testified in court against this man to a white judge. This person was represented by a white man who cross-examined me for over 7 hours. The court reporter another white man, flipped through a catalogue and highlighted things that he would like to purchase in the future and was visibly bored as I choked on tears, words and visions of a night I did not want to remember.
The lawyer who defended him did everything that he could to malign my character, to degrade and dehumanize me, even to go as far as calling me a circus freak at one point.
I was lucky to have family in the while I sat there staring out across at Babylon.
These people with a comfortable stride, with smiles on their faces, the lawyer, this attacker – I could see in their eyes the hatred, the complete disdain for life that led to the middle passage, that perpetuates a prision industrial complex that feeds on the souls of folks of colour, that drives a genocide of First Nations and indigenous peoples around the world.
There was no plea I could make, no logic, no reason that this little Nigger Grrl could create. Not even the truth in all of its rough, raw and shameful entirety was sufficient. Not even the fact that I had nothing to gain from this process and so much to lose. 

Throughout this whole process, the responsibility, the work has been left with me and my folks. Queer and trans folks, young people, people of colour, cash poor, we are used to the tragedies, the late night calls, the never ending battles and the lawyer - well he drove home in his Lexus.
The work of trying to forget what happened in order to cope, the work of rehearsed remembering in order to hold him accountable, the work of walking out of the courtroom on a ‘break’ only to be expected to share the same space with him and his conspirators. The work of being okay of making it through each day and of reconciling my years of surviving sexual violence prior to that. This is our work.

And through all this, I know that I am not alone and in many ways I am privileged to have a community of people who have shared experiences, who have brilliant wisdom and the capacity to support me while they make it through everyday.

And when I think of the mass injustice faced by Womyn Of Colour the world over, I am enraged and I need you all to be too.
I think about the 11 year old girl gang raped by 18 men in Texas, who didn’t tell a soul, and the way it came to light was because it was videotaped and put on facebook.
http://www.care2.com/causes/11-year-old-girl-gang-raped-by-18-men-in-texas.html

I think about Assata Shakur and Angela Davis.

I think about the Toronto Police officer who gave us the key to avoid sexual assault and rape – just stop dressing like sluts.

I think about the 'Highway of Tears'. http://www.missingnativewomen.org/bc.htm

I think about hundreds of women I have met who abound with stories of injustice and deal with the internalized sexism that persuades us that we have no one to blame but ourselves.
 

I am furious.

This is not over.

And in the illustrious words of a sister of mine,
“we are bigger than this system, we are bigger than it all”

I am not going down without a fight.
We are proud, resilient and free.

And I am not going to pour my energies into people into a system who deny our existence, who deny a system designed to oppress us.

I am determined to love my community even more fiercely, to nurture and feed myself and each other, and to remind us in the face of everything that we see that we are magnificent and abundant.

But today, I rest.
In Love & Solidarity